Aztec Resurrects zk.money — Because Your Wallet Balance Shouldn't Be Everyone's Business

Aztec Labs has relaunched zk.money, its self-custodial privacy wallet on Ethereum, three years after shutting the original down to build a new network. The wallet, which returned Tuesday, lets users send and receive stablecoins without exposing balances, amounts, or recipients onchain. Users register a human-readable handle such as bob.zk.money, resolved through the Ethereum Name Service to a deposit address. "Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn't mean publishing your financial history to the world," Aztec Labs CEO Joe Andrews said in a statement.

The new zk.money runs on Aztec Network, an Ethereum layer-2 that settles back to Ethereum and executes private functions locally on the user's device, where zero-knowledge proofs are generated to validate transactions without disclosing their contents. Aztec noted that deposits from Ethereum's mainnet remain visible, while transfers made within zk.money stay shielded. Supported assets include USDC, USDT and DAI sourced from exchanges or Ethereum wallets. Transaction caps apply during the rollout: each transfer is limited to $2,500, and all users share a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling. Aztec said the wallet is self-custodial, with no administrator privileges to freeze or move user funds.

The original zk.money, launched in 2021, attracted more than 75,000 wallets and processed over $100 million in volume before Aztec paused it to focus on its own network. That earlier effort was backed by a $17 million Paradigm-led funding round and later extended with Aztec Connect, a privacy toolkit for decentralized finance integrations.

The relaunch lands as privacy moves up Ethereum's roadmap. Developers are evaluating proposals tied to the upcoming Hegotá upgrade that would enable privacy pools to pay their own gas fees without intermediaries. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote over the weekend that special-purpose applications could achieve "very strong privacy" through zero-knowledge proofs as part of his broader "cryptographic world computer" vision.