Ethereum Gets Another Privacy Boost as Aztec Brings Back zk.money

Three years after pulling the plug, Aztec Labs is bringing zk.money back from the dead.

The privacy-focused Ethereum developer relaunched the self-custodial wallet Tuesday, letting users send and receive stablecoins without broadcasting balances, amounts, or recipients to the world.

Users claim a tag such as bob.zk.money, which resolves through the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, to a deposit address, according to Aztec’s posts on X.

“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 wallet runs on Aztec Network, which the company’s developer documentation describes as a privacy-first Ethereum layer-2, a separate network that settles back to Ethereum.

Private functions run on the user’s own device, which generates zero-knowledge proofs. These are cryptographic receipts that confirm a transaction is valid without revealing its details.

The private payments via zk.money, though, have their limits. Deposits from Ethereum remain public, Aztec noted, while payments made inside zk.money stay hidden. Users can send USDC, USDT or DAI from an exchange or Ethereum wallet.. Early caps also apply, since transactions are limited to $2,500 each, and all users share a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling.

Because the wallet is self-custodial, Aztec says it can’t spend or freeze user funds, and no privileged administrator controls it.

The original zk.money debuted in 2021 and drew more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume, Aztec said, before the team shelved it to build its own network. Back in 2021, Aztec raised $17 million in a Paradigm-led round. It also expanded zk.money with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for plugging its privacy tech into DeFi protocols.

The relaunch comes as privacy climbs Ethereum’s agenda. Developers are weighing proposals for next year’s Hegotá upgrade that would let privacy pools pay their own transaction fees without intermediaries.

And in a post this weekend, co-founder Vitalik Buterin said special-purpose apps could get “very strong privacy” through zero-knowledge proofs as part of his “cryptographic world computer” vision.