Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on September 29, 2026, reviving a self-custodial privacy wallet more than three years after the original version was discontinued in 2023.

The new zk.money runs on Aztec Network, the company's Ethereum Layer 2 built around zero-knowledge proofs. According to Aztec Labs, the wallet supports privacy-encrypted payments without publishing balances, payment amounts, or counterparties on the public ledger.

How does zk.money differ from a standard Ethereum wallet?

Standard Ethereum wallets expose every balance, transfer amount, and sender-recipient relationship through a transparent ledger readable on any block explorer. Aztec Labs said zk.money encrypts those three categories of data before transactions settle, while still anchoring finality to Ethereum through the rollup's settlement layer.

The "zk" prefix refers to zero-knowledge cryptography, a class of proofs that allow one party to demonstrate a transaction is valid without revealing the underlying inputs. By settling to Ethereum while keeping the transaction graph encrypted, the relaunched wallet positions privacy at the application layer rather than through pooled-mixing services that obfuscate transfers after the fact.

Self-custody remains a core design point. Users control their own keys rather than depositing funds with a custodian.

Aztec Labs describes Aztec Network as an Ethereum Layer 2 focused on privacy features, with the rollup serving as the execution environment for applications built around encrypted state. zk.money sits at the consumer end of that stack, providing a payments-focused interface to the underlying privacy primitives.

Why was the original wallet retired?

Aztec Labs stated that the early system was difficult to scale and could not support global-scale applications. The original wallet, which launched in 2021 and was retired in 2023, processed more than $100 million in transactions across more than 75,000 unique user addresses before it was shut down.

The relaunch transfers the product onto Aztec Network's rollup infrastructure, which the company argues resolves those scaling constraints. By relocating zk.money onto the same chain that hosts other Aztec-built privacy primitives, the wallet inherits the throughput and developer tooling the team has built out since 2023.

What does the relaunch signal for Aztec's product strategy?

The relaunch positions zk.money as a consumer-facing on-ramp rather than a developer-only tool. The wallet functions as the user-facing surface for Aztec Network, while the rollup itself continues to serve developers building privacy-preserving applications.

For Aztec Labs, the relaunch converts a dormant product into an entry point for the broader Aztec Network rollout, anchored to a user base the company had previously onboarded through the 2021 version. The company has not disclosed a public roadmap for follow-on features, integrations, or institutional partnerships tied to the relaunch.

Who uses zk.money?

The original zk.money drew a mix of retail users and developers experimenting with private on-chain payments before the 2023 shutdown. With the wallet back in operation, Aztec Labs is reintroducing the same product surface to a market that has materially matured. The relaunch also restores a self-custodial option that disappeared from the market three years ago, with the original having onboarded more than 75,000 unique addresses.

Ethereum Layer 2s now compete on throughput and fees, and zero-knowledge proofs have moved from research curiosities to deployed infrastructure across multiple rollups. The wallet is live now.

Aztec Labs is steering one of the higher-profile consumer products in the zero-knowledge rollup segment back into an active market it left in 2023, with no announced timeline for further product disclosures.