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Aztec Labs relaunches zk.money privacy wallet on Aztec Network

The self-custodial wallet returns two years after Aztec Labs shut down the original, now settling private DAI payments on its own zk-rollup with per-transfer caps.

by 4 min read
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Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on September 29, 2026, three years after shuttering the original in 2024. The self-custodial wallet handles private, ENS-style payments (bob.zk.money) on Aztec Network, the team's zk-rollup connected to Ethereum. Deposits from Ethereum still expose the sender address and amount; every transfer inside Aztec after that is shielded. The relaunch ships with hard caps: under $2,500 per deposit, payment or withdrawal, and a $50,000 shared daily deposit ceiling across all users.

What relaunched

zk.money is a non-custodial browser wallet whose entire purpose is to hide amounts, balances and counterparties on-chain. Aztec Labs, which controls neither user funds nor a censorship key, cannot freeze or move balances. Deposits accept USDC, USDT or DAI from Ethereum; USDC and USDT auto-convert to DAI on deposit, so DAI is the only unit of account inside the wallet, according to CoinDesk's write-up.

Two visible design choices:

  • Readable handles. Users register bob.zk.money-style ENS subnames instead of copying addresses. Payment links work off the same handles.
  • Selective disclosure. Users can grant per-counterparty visibility rather than publishing anything to the world.

CEO Joe Andrews framed the pitch narrowly: "Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn't mean publishing your financial history to the world." No language about mixing, obfuscation of provenance, or compliance-side promises appears in the launch material.

The privacy boundary is at the deposit, not the wallet

The critical caveat, spelled out in both source articles: a deposit from Ethereum reveals the sender and amount. Only balances and transfers already inside Aztec Network are shielded. That mirrors the trust model of every shielded pool ever shipped on Ethereum — the on-ramp is where address labelling happens.

The caps make that boundary more consequential in practice: with ~$2,500 per action and a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling shared across the whole user base, zk.money is positioned as a small-payments wallet, not a treasury-scale privacy layer. The shared daily ceiling is unusual — competing shielded systems typically cap per-user, not per-user-base — and will meter growth mechanically until Aztec Labs raises it.

What happened to v1

The original zk.money launched in 2021, ran on Aztec Connect (a Turbo-PLONK rollup that batched DeFi calls on behalf of Ethereum users) and was shut down in 2024 after Aztec Labs pivoted engineering to the current Aztec Network. Before shutdown, v1 processed more than $100M in volume across 75,000+ wallets, per The Block. Aztec Labs raised $125M in total funding, including a $100M Series B led by a16z crypto and Paradigm in 2022.

Numbers block

  • Supported deposit assets: USDC, USDT, DAI (all convert to DAI internally)
  • Per-transfer cap: < $2,500 (deposit, payment or withdrawal)
  • Shared daily deposit ceiling: $50,000 across all users
  • Original v1: 75,000+ wallets, $100M+ volume, live 2021–2024
  • Aztec Labs funding to date: $125M, incl. a $100M Series B (a16z crypto, Paradigm, 2022)
  • Sources: The Block, CoinDesk

What to watch

  1. How fast the daily ceiling lifts. A shared $50k/day cap is a beta-flow gate, not a product-market fit signal. Track raises.
  2. Handle collision policy. ENS subnames on zk.money will attract impersonation attempts within days.
  3. Selective-disclosure UX. The interesting differentiator vs. mixers isn't the shielded pool — it's whether Aztec Labs makes counterparty-scoped visibility usable enough for compliance-conscious users.
  4. Regulatory response. Aztec Connect ran without incident on the compliance front, but the political climate for private-payments tooling has hardened since 2023.

Context

Aztec Labs' first-generation product, Aztec Connect, was deprecated on March 21, 2023; its admin keys were subsequently renounced, and its L1 settlement contract was drained for $2.19M in June 2026 through a ZK proof boundary bug — we covered that exploit at the time. Aztec Labs was explicit then that the deprecated contract had no link to the current Aztec Network. The v2 zk.money runs on the current network and shares none of the v1 rollup's code.

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