Three years after shutting it down, Aztec Labs is bringing zk.money back to life. The privacy-focused Ethereum developer relaunched the self-custodial wallet on Tuesday, allowing users to send and receive stablecoins without broadcasting their balances, transaction amounts, or recipients to the world.

The revived wallet runs on Aztec Network, which the company's developer documentation describes as a privacy-first Ethereum Layer-2: a separate network that runs alongside Ethereum and settles back to it. Payments made within zk.money remain hidden, while deposits from Ethereum remain visible to anyone.

Users claim a personal tag—such as bob.zk.money—which resolves via the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Ethereum's native naming system, to a deposit address, according to Aztec's posts on X, in which followers were urged to claim their tags now.

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

Aztec announced the relaunch in a post on X:

is back. In 2021, brought private transactions to Ethereum: 75,000+ wallets and $100M in volume. Today it relaunches on the fully decentralized Aztec Network. Claim your tag now 👇 pic.twitter.com/Vabi9jYitK
— Aztec (@aztecnetwork) September 29, 2026

Under the hood, zk.money's private functions run on the users' own device, which generates zero-knowledge proofs. These cryptographic receipts confirm that a transaction is valid without revealing its details. In practice, the validity of a payment can be verified without disclosing who paid whom or how much. This approach contrasts with standard Ethereum transactions, where transfer amounts and addresses are openly readable on the public chain.

The private payments do come with limitations. Users can send USDC, US, or DAI—stablecoins designed to maintain a stable value against fiat currencies like the US dollar—from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet, but deposits to the network remain public, Aztec noted. Early rollout caps also apply: individual transactions are limited to $2,500, and all users share a daily deposit cap of $50,000.

Since the wallet is self-custodial, users retain control over their own keys instead of entrusting their funds to a company. Aztec states that it cannot spend or freeze user funds, and that no privileged administrator controls the wallet—leaving the safekeeping of the keys, and the funds behind them, entirely in the hands of the users.

The original zk.money debuted in 2021 and attracted more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume, according to Aztec, before the team shelved the product to focus on building its own network. In the same year, the startup raised $17 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. Aztec also expanded zk.money with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for integrating its privacy technology into DeFi protocols.

The relaunch comes at a time when privacy is rising on Ethereum's agenda and becoming an increasingly prominent focus for the network's developer community. Developers are considering proposals for next year's Hegotá upgrade that would allow privacy pools to pay their own transaction fees without intermediaries. The wallet's return pairs a consumer-facing product with these protocol-level efforts.

In a post published this weekend, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that special-purpose applications could achieve "very strong privacy" through zero-knowledge proofs, as part of his vision of a "cryptographic world computer" for the network. What to watch going forward: how usage develops within the early transaction limits, and whether the Hegotá proposals—still being weighed by developers—move forward.