Aztec Brings Back zk.money: The Private Payments Wallet Returns After Three Years With No Admin Keys and ENS-Style Tags

Aztec Labs has relaunched zk.money, bringing back its private payments wallet after a three-year absence and returning one of the earliest brand names in Ethereum privacy to an active product with a new network underneath it.

The company announced the relaunch on Sep. 29, saying users can access the wallet through the zk.money website or through a frontend run on their own device. A mobile app is planned, and the website is already open for users to claim a personal handle.

## What the new zk.money actually does

According to Aztec Labs, the relaunched wallet keeps balances, transfer amounts, and the parties to a transaction off the public ledger. On Ethereum’s base layer, anyone can look up an address and see its full history and holdings. zk.money is built to give account holders a way to pay and get paid without publishing those details.

“Onchain transactions between two individuals shouldn’t mean publishing your financial history to the world,” Joe Andrews, CEO of Aztec Labs, said in the announcement. He described zk.money as a wallet where users retain control of their financial history.

The wallet replaces long hexadecimal Ethereum addresses with readable names such as bob.zk.money. Users can send or request funds by sharing a link, and the tags are built on Ethereum Name Service technology that resolves wherever ENS CCIP is supported. Users also control who can interact with their tag, the company said.

Aztec Labs added that people can send funds to zk.money tags directly from exchanges on Ethereum, though the announcement did not name participating exchanges or specify which assets are supported. For a user holding crypto on an exchange, the feature offers a route into a private wallet if their platform supports sending to the tag format.

## Self-custody by design

The company emphasized that zk.money uses self-custodial wallets and immutable smart contracts, with no privileged administrator role that can move or freeze user funds. The distinction matters for anyone transferring assets from an exchange: once the transfer is complete, control of the funds rests entirely with the wallet holder.

The release describes future connections with Ethereum decentralized finance protocols, but no specific integration was announced. For now, the stated payment options are payment links, zk.money tags, and transfers from Ethereum exchanges.

## A brand with history

The original zk.money launched in 2021 and served more than 75,000 unique wallets, processing roughly 100 million USD in transaction volume before Aztec Labs retired it in 2023 to focus on building a general-purpose private network. The returning wallet runs on that network — the privacy-focused Aztec Network, an Ethereum layer-2 — rather than the infrastructure behind the original product.

That underlying network has been under active development this year. In July, Aztec shipped its v5 alpha release, which introduced a system allowing applications to use private and public data within the same layer-2 environment. The design performs private computations on a user’s device and submits cryptographic proofs for verification without revealing the underlying transaction details, opening the door to private smart contracts that can still interact with public blockchain activity.

In May, the company also acquired ZKPassport’s identity tools and committed to keeping the app and code open source. ZKPassport lets users prove selected details from an identity document without disclosing the entire document, and its tools were used for sanctions checks during Aztec’s December 2025 token sale. No ZKPassport feature has been announced in the relaunched wallet.

## Old contracts, old incidents

The relaunch follows a summer of security investigations involving deprecated Aztec products. In June, Aztec Labs investigated a roughly 2 million USD transfer from an immutable contract tied to a discontinued payments product launched in 2021. The Aztec Foundation said at the time that the affected product had no links to the current network’s smart contracts or the AZTEC token, and Aztec Labs said it held no administrator keys for the old system and could not pause or upgrade it.

Days earlier, an attacker drained about 2.1 million USD from Aztec Connect, a separate retired product. Aztec Labs said users and assets on the current network were unaffected, and both exploited contracts belonged to deprecated products with no connection to the network that now hosts zk.money.

For the new wallet, the absence of a privileged administrator is presented as a core feature rather than a limitation. The trade-off is the same one that defines self-custody everywhere: the user is the only line of defense for their funds.

## Market context

The relaunch lands amid steady if unspectacular market conditions. At the time of writing, Bitcoin trades near 83,614 USD, Ethereum near 2,689 USD, and Solana near 119 USD, per Binance spot data. Ethereum layer-2 activity has increasingly split between generalized rollups competing on fees and purpose-built networks like Aztec competing on privacy — and zk.money is the company’s clearest attempt yet to put a consumer-facing product on that second track.