Aztec Revives zk.money Wallet for Private Stablecoin Payments on Ethereum

Aztec Labs has brought its zk.money wallet back online, three years after shelving the product, giving Ethereum users a way to move stablecoins without publishing balances, amounts or recipients onchain.

The self-custodial wallet, relaunched Tuesday, runs on Aztec Network, which the company's developer documentation describes as a privacy-first Ethereum layer-2 — a separate chain that settles transactions back to Ethereum. Users claim a tag such as bob.zk.money, which resolves through the Ethereum Name Service 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.

Privacy comes from zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic receipts that confirm a transaction is valid without revealing its contents. Aztec says those proofs are generated on the user's own device, so private functions execute locally rather than on a server.

Limits on what stays hidden

The privacy is partial. Deposits from Ethereum remain public, Aztec noted, while payments made inside zk.money stay hidden. Users can fund the wallet with USDC, USDT or DAI sent from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet.

Early capacity is also constrained: each transaction is capped at $2,500, and all users share a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling. Because the wallet is self-custodial, Aztec says it cannot spend or freeze user funds, and no privileged administrator controls it.

The original zk.money launched in 2021 and attracted more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume before the team set it aside to build its own network, according to Aztec. The company raised $17 million that year in a Paradigm-led round and later extended the wallet with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for linking its privacy technology to DeFi protocols.

The relaunch lands as privacy moves up Ethereum's agenda. Developers are weighing proposals for next year's Hegotá upgrade that would allow privacy pools to pay their own transaction fees without intermediaries. In a post over the weekend, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said special-purpose applications could achieve very strong privacy through zero-knowledge proofs, framing it as part of his "cryptographic world computer" vision.