# Anounamous- Private Governance for NounsDao: Aztec & Noir
## Collaboration with Aztec Protocol
Mach 34, the applicant of this proposal, has an ongoing partnership with Aztec Network. This started with our recent [proliferation of full-stack Aztec Noir resources](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25_FzjlG7ZU&list=PLabpoAlaCBY3SM6xHmZCOhPHlmLB4EY6H). We received a grant via the Aztec Grants Program to complete our BattleZips in Noir project and have developed a strong working relationship with the Aztec team via that grant. Aztec reached out to us when the initial Prop House proposal was launched to discuss how our work could be applied here as an implementation to submit for this Nouns proposal. Beyond advisory support, the Aztec team has signaled their commitment to ensuring that the necessary cryptographic primitives for this proposal are available and secure for Noir use.

If you didn’t know, Aztec’s co-founders are responsible for [PlonK](https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/953). Aztec has aggregated incredible talent in applying Zero Knowledge and regularly proves their devotion to a scalable, privacy-preserving future for web3. We sought to work with Aztec to try to be a part of their vision. The established relationship is critical to Mach 34 being a viable choice for NounsDao. Aztec is not directly taking ownership in this proposal or its tasks, but they are engaging as a senior advisor that can validate our ideas and implementations, and help direct our focus towards the state-of-the-art solutions that Noir supports, like storage proofs or UltraPlonk ECDSA. We consider them helpful partners, advisors, and friends.

## UltraPlonk in Aztec Noir
**Why DSL's?**
Though Zero Knowledge DSLs will never be as efficient as pure SDKs for generating Zero Knowledge proofs like Halo2, they make up for it in ease of use. More specifically, DSLs try to make using zero-knowledge proofs as close to traditional programming as possible. Without DSL's to mitigate experience in the cryptographic domain, ZK is only accessible to a small pool of developers that can work directly with complex proving systems. Therefore, the ratio of ZK Devs capable of wielding DSLs to ZK Devs capable of working with the most complex proving systems will continue to grow in favor of DSLs. Therefore, unpredictable long-term maintenance costs will intrinsically be lower using DSLs.

Generally, DSLs also come with built-in on-chain verification contract generation. This is the case for Aztec Noir on the EVM. UltraPlonk proofs cost about 400,000 gas to verify on-chain; however, this cost can largely be circumvented with optimistic zero knowledge.

**Why Aztec Noir**
There are a lot of features we like about Aztec Noir; however, this is not a Noir sales pitch. Aztec Noir is the right choice for this job for three reasons:

* Aztec Noir’s UltraPlonk is currently the only DSL to offer performance approaching that of Halo2
* Aztec UltraPlonk enables efficient ECDSA/ Keccak verification that [Circom currently can’t facilitate](https://github.com/0xPARC/circom-ecdsa)
* IVC Recursion support

The usefulness of UltraPlonk, ECDSA/ Keccak, and IVC recursion is explored in subsequent sections.