Aztec Caps zk.money Transfers at $2,500 on Its Privacy Relaunch

Aztec Labs brought zk.money back on Monday, three years after retiring it, and wrote hard limits into the relaunch. Every transfer on the private payments wallet is capped at $2,500, and deposits across all users share a ceiling of $50,000 a day. The wallet runs on Aztec Network, the company's privacy-focused Ethereum layer 2, and moves DAI, USDC and USDT between handles that read like bob.zk.money. Balances, amounts and counterparties stay off the public ledger once the money is inside. Getting it in does not work that way. A deposit from Ethereum is still a visible transaction, with sender and amount on the chain.

Two dates for the same shutdown

The original wallet's history is agreed in every part but one. It launched in 2021, took in more than 75,000 unique wallets and processed over $100 million in volume before the team pulled it. The Block, Decrypt and crypto.news all date the shutdown to 2023, and chief executive Joe Andrews says 2023 in his own quoted words. CoinDesk puts it in 2024. The two do not reconcile, and neither outlet acknowledges the other's date.

"We sunset in 2023, not because private payments were a failed thesis, but because they needed infrastructure that did not yet exist," Andrews said.

The old system, on the same account, was very hard to add features to and did not scale globally. Three years went into Aztec Network.

The caps sit next to a known flaw

Aztec disclosed a critical vulnerability in its Alpha V5 proving system this summer. Core contributors found it on 27 July through internal AI-assisted auditing, and the company's advisory says an attacker could build a proof that passes network verification for a transaction the rules should have rejected. The disclosure puts V5 funds, applications and contract state at risk in Aztec's own words, and adds a line that matters more than the flaw itself: chain history does not carry enough information to tell whether anyone used it. A V6 release later this year adds circuit updates that refuse proofs from the affected system.

Unchained dates the public disclosure to 7 August and ties it directly to the transfer caps, reading the limits as a bound on the loss if a soundness fault and a second failure arrive together. It describes the mitigation, a system called Oxide, as sealed servers that co-sign transactions. CoinDesk describes Oxide more loosely, as a separate system that checks for bugs. Those are not the same claim. Only Unchained connects the caps to the vulnerability.

What a deposit still costs and shows

The fees are small and stated. A deposit costs 35 cents plus Ethereum gas, a withdrawal costs 20 cents, and each user gets 100 sponsored transactions a day inside the system. CoinDesk adds that USDC and USDT are converted into DAI once they land, a step the other accounts read here leave out. The software is unaudited and the company calls this an early alpha. In one rendering Andrews says the limits are there because the cryptography is experimental and will rise as confidence does. That version stands on a single outlet.

What has to hold before the caps move

Aztec has been hit before at the edges of its own stack. Its retired contracts were drained twice in four days for $4.4 million in June, from code the company had been outside of since 2024. That is a different codebase, so the episode is not a read on this release. It is the reason the alpha framing is worth taking literally. Privacy work elsewhere has kept moving, and Starknet shipped its STRK20 standard for arbitrary ERC-20 tokens this year.

The Block reports DeFi integrations and a mobile app for the fourth quarter, and puts Aztec's total funding at $125 million, including a $100 million Series B in 2022 from a16z crypto and Paradigm. Neither the roadmap nor the funding figure appears elsewhere in this sweep. What nobody has published is how much has actually moved through the relaunched wallet since Monday. With a shared ceiling of $50,000 a day, that number has a hard upper bound until Aztec decides the proving system has earned a higher one.