Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on Tuesday, restoring its self-custodial wallet for private stablecoin payments on Aztec Network, an Ethereum layer 2 built for private transactions.
The product returns with hard limits in place. Every deposit, payment, and withdrawal must stay below $2,500. The wallet is also going live before Aztec delivers a fix for a critical flaw the team found this summer in the network’s proving system.
How zk.money handles private payments
On Ethereum, a payment is visible to anyone who checks either address, including each wallet’s balance and transaction history. According to zk.money’s documentation, a payment between two zk.money users places neither the amount nor the name on a public chain.
“Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn’t mean publishing your financial history to the world,” Aztec Labs CEO Joe Andrews said in a statement.
User tags replace raw addresses
Each user can choose a name such as bob.zk.money, and Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, points that name to a deposit address. Anyone can send USDC, USDT, or DAI to that tag from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet.
Deposits and withdrawals still appear publicly on Ethereum. What happens between those points does not. The wallet itself holds only DAI, so incoming USDC and USDT are swapped on arrival.
Caps, fees, and screening rules
Beyond the $2,500 per-transaction ceiling, all users share a $50,000 daily deposit allowance. A deposit costs $0.35, a withdrawal costs $0.20, and each user gets 100 sponsored transactions a day.
Aztec said the Ethereum address used for a deposit and the address used for a withdrawal are screened under a sanctions policy.
Launch arrives before the V6 fix
Aztec disclosed on Aug. 7 that contributors had found a critical vulnerability in its Alpha V5 proving system on July 27. The company said an attacker could get an invalid transaction accepted and warned that the flaw put V5 funds at risk.
At the time, Aztec asked teams planning V5 deployments to pause. It said the fix would arrive with V6, which is planned for later in 2026. Andrews said zk.money would launch before that fix ships.
The wallet relies on a separate protocol called Oxide. Its sealed servers co-sign every send and withdrawal. Under Aztec’s stated trust model, taking funds out would require both a soundness fault in Aztec Network and a compromised enclave at the same time. The caps are intended to limit losses in that scenario.
What Aztec says about the earlier version
Aztec said the first version, launched in 2021, attracted more than 75,000 wallets and processed $100 million.
“We sunset in 2023, not because private payments were a failed thesis, but because they needed infrastructure that did not yet exist,” Andrews said in an interview.
Separately, Ethereum developers are weighing a proposal for native private transfers in the Hegotá upgrade.