Aztec Labs relaunched zk.money on Tuesday, reviving a self-custodial privacy wallet it shut down three years ago and deploying it on the Aztec Network, the company's privacy-first Ethereum layer-2 that settles back to mainnet.

The wallet lets users send and receive stablecoins without broadcasting balances, amounts, or recipients to third parties. Users claim a human-readable tag such as bob.zk.money, which resolves through the Ethereum Name Service to a deposit address, according to Aztec's posts on X.

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

The privacy model has clear boundaries. Deposits from Ethereum into zk.money remain public, Aztec noted, while payments made inside the wallet stay hidden. Users can fund accounts with USDC, USDT, or DAI from an exchange or an Ethereum wallet. Early-rollover limits constrain the product: individual transactions are capped at $2,500, and all users share a combined $50,000 daily deposit ceiling.

Technically, the wallet leans on zero-knowledge proofs generated on the user's own device. Private functions execute locally, producing cryptographic receipts that confirm a transaction is valid without revealing its details to the network. Because the wallet is self-custodial, Aztec says it cannot spend or freeze user funds, and no privileged administrator can control the system.

The original zk.money debuted in 2021 and attracted more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in transaction volume before Aztec shelved the product to concentrate on building its own network, the company said. That same year, Aztec raised $17 million in a Paradigm-led funding round and extended zk.money with Aztec Connect, a toolkit for integrating its privacy technology into DeFi protocols.

The relaunch lands as privacy climbs Ethereum's development agenda. Protocol developers are weighing proposals for next year's Hegotá upgrade that would let privacy pools pay their own transaction fees without intermediaries. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in a post published over the weekend, argued that special-purpose applications could achieve "very strong privacy" through zero-knowledge proofs as part of his "cryptographic world computer" vision.

The operational trade-offs are significant for institutional adoption. The public deposit path means on-chain analysts can still observe inflows from Ethereum, limiting the wallet's usefulness for concealing the origin of funds. The $50,000 shared daily deposit ceiling and $2,000-per-transaction cap also restrict throughput during the early rollout, positioning the product as a consumer pilot rather than an infrastructure-grade payments rail.

Aztec has not disclosed when it plans to raise those caps or expand the stablecoin selection. The company's decision to rebuild zk.money on its own network, rather than as a mainnet product, signals a broader strategic bet: that privacy-preserving payments will migrate to dedicated layer-2s where zero-knowledge proof generation happens client-side by default. Whether regulators tolerate that architecture at scale remains an open question, and the pace at which Aztec lifts its transaction limits will offer an early read on demand.