Aztec Labs brought zk.money back online this week, restoring a self-custodial privacy wallet on Aztec Network roughly three years after the original shut down. The relaunch lets users claim readable tags that resolve through ENS and send stablecoin payments designed to hide amounts, balances, and recipients from public view.
There's a catch. Deposits are reportedly capped at $2,500, which puts a hard ceiling on how much money can move through the system in the near term. For a wallet that once logged more than 75,000 wallets and $100 million in volume, the restart is deliberately small.
What the wallet actually does
Zk.money deposits reportedly support DAI, USDC, and USDT, with funds converted to DAI once they're inside the system. Payments are built so that an outside observer can't read the transaction amount, the sender's balance, or who received the money.
The tag system is the other piece. Users can claim human-readable tags that resolve through ENS, which means you can send to a name instead of a string of characters. Aztec's Joe Andrews frames the whole product around a simple argument: ordinary payments shouldn't expose a user's financial history to anyone with a block explorer.
That pitch is the same one that got zk.money traction before it went offline. The historical numbers — 75,000 wallets, $100 million in volume — are worth noting, but they aren't evidence of current adoption. The relaunch starts from zero, and the deposit cap makes that explicit.
The $2,500 ceiling
A deposit cap is an unusual thing to ship on day one. It limits how much liquidity can accumulate, which in turn limits how useful the wallet is for anything beyond small transfers. Whether that's a temporary guardrail or a longer-term design choice isn't clear from what's been disclosed.
What it does signal is caution. Privacy tools tend to attract regulatory attention, and a cap is one way to keep the system's footprint small while it's being tested in the open. The trade-off is that near-term scale is boxed in.
Zcash is having its own privacy moment
The relaunch lands in a week when Zcash reported 56% of transactions as shielded — its highest share in at least two years. Zcash also has Network Upgrade 7 on the schedule, which gives the privacy narrative another near-term catalyst.
Two privacy stories in the same week isn't a coordinated trend, but it's a reminder that the sector doesn't move in lockstep with the rest of the market. Privacy demand has its own cycle.
ETH is stuck under the band
Ethereum is trading at $2,665, flat over 24 hours and sitting below a $2,700–$2,735 resistance band. The intraday range is $2,662–$2,689, and the low at $2,662.59 is the immediate level to watch if the bear case starts playing out.
In an earlier technical snapshot, ETH traded above its 7-, 25-, and 99-period moving averages at $2,710, $2,693, and $2,680. Those levels are now overhead reference points rather than support. The bull case requires reclaiming $2,700 and holding above $2,735 to flip the old resistance band into support. No confirmed price target is available.
For now, the privacy wallet relaunch is its own story, separate from where ETH prints. The next concrete thing to watch is whether the $2,500 cap stays in place or gets lifted as zk.money finds its footing again.
