Three years after pulling the plug, Aztec Labs is bringing zk.money back from the dead. The privacy-focused Ethereum developer relaunched the self-custodial wallet on Tuesday, letting users 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 inside zk.money stay hidden, while deposits made from Ethereum remain visible to anyone.

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

"Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn't mean publishing your financial history to the world," Aztec Labs CEO Joe Andrews said 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 user's own device, which generates zero-knowledge proofs. These cryptographic receipts confirm that a transaction is valid without revealing its details. In practice, a payment's validity can be verified without exposing who paid whom, or how much. The approach contrasts with standard Ethereum transactions, where transfer amounts and addresses are openly readable on the public chain.

The private payments do come with limits. Users can send USDC, US, or DAI—stablecoins designed to hold a steady value against fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar—from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet, but deposits onto the network stay public, Aztec noted. Early rollout caps apply as well: individual transactions are limited to $2,500, and all users share a $50,000 daily deposit ceiling.

Because the wallet is self-custodial, users retain control of their own keys rather than entrusting funds to a company. Aztec says it cannot spend or freeze user funds, and no privileged administrator controls the wallet—leaving safekeeping of those keys, and the funds behind them, entirely in users' hands.

The original zk.money debuted in 2021 and drew 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. That same year, the startup raised $17 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. It also expanded zk.money with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for plugging its privacy technology into DeFi protocols.

The relaunch comes as privacy climbs Ethereum's agenda, becoming an increasingly prominent focus for the network's developer community. Developers are weighing proposals for next year's Hegotá upgrade that would let privacy pools pay their own transaction fees without intermediaries. The wallet's return pairs a consumer-facing product with these protocol-level efforts.

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