Aztec Labs relaunches zk.money wallet for private Ethereum payments

What happened

Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on the Aztec Network, bringing back its private payment wallet after a three-year absence and offering users self-custody of their funds. The company shared the news in a Sep. 29 announcement, and said users can access the relaunched wallet through the zk.money website or a frontend run on their own device. The wallet runs on the Aztec Network, which the company describes as a privacy-first Ethereum layer-2 that settles back to Ethereum.

Payments use readable tags. A user can claim a name such as bob.zk.money, which replaces a long Ethereum address, and send or request funds by sharing a link. Aztec Labs said the tags use Ethereum Name Service technology that resolves wherever ENS CCIP is supported, and that users control who can interact with their tag. A mobile app is planned.

The wallet hides balances, payment amounts, and the parties to a transfer from the public ledger. The privacy has limits: deposits from Ethereum remain public, while payments made inside zk.money stay hidden. Early caps apply too, since transactions are limited to $2,500 each and all users share a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling. Users can send USDC, USDT or DAI from an exchange or Ethereum wallet.

Because the wallet is self-custodial, Aztec says it can't spend or freeze user funds, and no privileged administrator controls it. Private functions run on the user's own device, which generates zero-knowledge proofs.

Why it matters

On Ethereum's public ledger, an address can expose its balance and transaction history to anyone who looks it up. Aztec Labs said zk.money gives account holders a way to make payments without publishing those details.

Joe Andrews, CEO of Aztec Labs, said two individuals paying each other onchain should not mean publishing a financial history to the world.

Privacy is climbing 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. 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.

Background

The first zk.money launched in 2021 and served more than 75,000 unique wallets and $100 million in volume, according to Aztec Labs, before it was retired in 2023 while the team built infrastructure for a general-purpose private network.

Back in 2021, Aztec raised $17 million in a Paradigm-led round. The team also expanded zk.money with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for plugging its privacy tech into DeFi protocols.

In July, crypto.news covered Aztec's v5 alpha release, which introduced a system for applications to use private and public data within the same Ethereum layer-2 environment.

What is still unclear

• Aztec Labs did not name the exchanges that support transfers to zk.money tags, or say which assets those exchanges handle.
• The launch describes future connections with Ethereum DeFi protocols, but no specific integration was announced.

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