Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented a functional demonstration of an anonymous messaging forum built on the Aztec network. The project combines privacy for users with an on-chain moderation system, offering a practical example of how decentralized applications can balance anonymity and community rules.
The new feature was shared by Buterin on Farcaster, where he described the initiative as an experimental version, "vibe-coded," inspired by the concept of an "anonymous billboard with moderation" that he had presented in an article published in 2022. All of the application's code was made publicly available in his repository on GitHub.
The demonstration was developed using Aztec's infrastructure, a second-layer Ethereum solution focused on privacy. In this model, users deposit ETH on the main network before publishing messages anonymously on layer 2. After that, the assets can be withdrawn again to layer 1, without the posts revealing the sender's address or any public link to the initial deposit.
According to Buterin, Aztec also reached stage 2 of decentralization, considered the highest level in the maturity classification of Layer 2 solutions. The information was shared in another post on the Farcaster platform.
The system includes a moderation mechanism capable of identifying content considered inappropriate. When a post is classified as "immoral," it no longer appears in the forum's default view and the author receives a temporary penalty, which increases the interval required to make a new post.
The analysis of the messages is carried out by a local daemon based on a language model (LLM). The software compares each post with a moderation policy stored directly on the blockchain. These rules can be consulted both by the application and by the command-line interface and the monitoring system itself.
Another implemented feature is publication frequency control. The waiting time between messages decreases according to the amount deposited in ETH. According to the project's documentation, a deposit of 0,001 ETH allows one post per hour, while 0,01 ETH enables ten posts in the same period.
The protocol's security also received special attention. The documentation states that properties related to privacy, deposit protection, publication limits, and moderation operation were formally verified using Lean 4, with 70 proven mathematical theorems and no gaps.
Despite the technical progress, the repository classifies the application as an early work. There are still pending features, including improvements in access control and complete testing for browsers. Even so, Buterin stated that the demonstration can already do "very interesting non-trivial things".