Aztec relaunches zk.money for private DAI payments

Aztec Labs has relaunched zk.money as a self-custodial wallet for private stablecoin payments on Aztec Network, restoring a consumer product name that the company retired from its earlier architecture. The live product documentation says transfers made inside the wallet conceal balances, amounts and participants from the public chain, while deposits from and withdrawals to Ethereum remain visible.

The relaunch matters because it turns Aztec’s privacy-focused layer 2 into a user-facing payments product rather than only infrastructure for developers. It also creates a practical test of whether an account based on passkeys, human-readable tags and zero-knowledge proofs can deliver usable privacy without custody. The launch does not make every part of a payment private, remove smart-contract risk or establish adoption.

A new system behind an old name

Aztec’s documentation describes the current zk.money as a new product on new architecture. The original wallet stopped accepting deposits in 2023 and shut down in March 2024; old accounts and balances do not carry over.

The new version derives wallet keys from a passkey. Users can receive payments through public tags or single-use Ethereum deposit addresses, send funds within zk.money and withdraw to Ethereum. Transactions are proved on the user’s device, according to the documentation, and the operator says it has no privileged administrative key capable of moving user funds.

DAI is the only token held by the portal at launch. Users may deposit DAI, USDC or USDT from Ethereum, but USDC and USDT are swapped into DAI through Curve on entry. The documentation warns that the swap has no price floor, so a deposit of one dollar-denominated token is not guaranteed to produce the same numerical amount of DAI. No other token or source chain is supported under the launch configuration.

Privacy has visible edges

Payments between zk.money users do not publish the amount or counterparties on a public chain. That protection ends at the system boundary: Ethereum deposits and withdrawals expose addresses, amounts and timestamps. Similar amounts moved in and out close together can also invite inference even when no contract directly links them.

Tags are public. Anyone who knows or guesses a tag can look up its associated Aztec and Ethereum account addresses, although the documentation says that does not reveal the wallet’s private balance or internal payment history. The Aztec node can link a set of note requests to one account, and an external resolver sees additional metadata when someone outside zk.money pays a tag. Those qualifications make “private payments” more accurate than “anonymous payments.”

The wallet also screens deposit and withdrawal addresses against an off-chain sanctions policy. Its frontend and relayer can refuse service, even though the underlying portal contract contains no address blocklist. Self-custody therefore does not mean every default interface or operating service is censorship-resistant.

Launch limits cap exposure and utility

Official documentation viewed September 30 sets each deposit, payment and withdrawal below $2,500. Deposits also share a rolling $50,000 daily limit across all users; it is not an individual allowance and does not reset at a fixed time. Aztec says these caps limit possible loss in a documented failure scenario and serve as safeguards while the system is new. Raising them requires deploying a new portal contract and users choosing to move funds.

The same launch documentation lists a $0.35 deposit fee and a $0.20 withdrawal fee, excluding Ethereum gas that users pay when depositing or when completing certain actions themselves. It also offers up to 100 sponsored in-wallet transactions per user per day, but that subsidy can pause if its fee-paying contract is empty or network fees exceed what the contract will cover.

Operational dependence remains. Every exit requires a signature from a registered secure enclave; if none is running, withdrawals wait until one returns. Losing the passkey also means losing access because zk.money keeps no recovery copy. Those limits do not negate the relaunch, but they define what is live now: a constrained private-payment system whose privacy, availability and recovery assumptions should be judged separately from the broader promise of confidential finance.