Aztec Revives Its Private Payments Wallet, Capping Every Transfer Below $2,500

Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on Tuesday, bringing back its self-custodial wallet for private stablecoin payments on Aztec Network, a layer 2 on Ethereum built for private transactions. Every deposit, payment and withdrawal must stay below $2,500, and the wallet is live before Aztec ships a fix for a critical flaw it found in the network’s proving system this summer.

A payment on Ethereum is visible to anyone who looks up either address, along with each wallet’s balance and history. A payment between two zk.money users puts no amount and no name on a public chain, according to the wallet’s documentation.

“Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn’t mean publishing your financial history to the world,” Aztec Labs CEO Joe Andrews said in a statement.

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Each user picks a name like bob.zk.money, and ENS points that name to a deposit address. Anyone can pay that tag in USDC, USDT or DAI from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet. Deposits and withdrawals are still public on Ethereum; what happens between them is not.

The wallet holds only DAI, so USDC and USDT are swapped on arrival. On top of the per-transaction cap, all users draw from one shared $50,000 daily deposit allowance. A deposit costs 35 cents, a withdrawal 20 cents, and each user gets 100 sponsored transactions a day. The Ethereum address a deposit comes from and the one a withdrawal goes to are screened against a sanctions policy.

Aztec disclosed on Aug. 7 that contributors had found a critical vulnerability in its Alpha V5 proving system on July 27. An attacker could get a bad transaction accepted, and the post said the flaw puts V5 funds at risk. It asked teams planning V5 deployments to pause and said the fix would come with V6, planned for later in 2026.

Andrews said zk.money would launch before that fix. The wallet relies on a separate protocol, Oxide, whose sealed servers co-sign every send and withdrawal. According to the trust model, taking funds out “needs a soundness fault in the Aztec Network and a compromised enclave at the same time.” The caps are meant to limit losses in that case.

Aztec said the first version, launched in 2021, drew more than 75,000 wallets and handled $100 million. Ethereum developers are separately weighing a proposal for native private transfers in the Hegotá upgrade.

“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.

Related Listen: Zcash, Ethereum, Aztec, Canton and More: Which Chain Will Win the Privacy Race?

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