What is Freedom Dollar (fUSD)?

Freedom Dollar (fUSD) is a privacy-focused stablecoin launched in January 2025 on the Zano blockchain. Designed to maintain a 1:1 peg with the U.S. dollar, it combines the stability of traditional money with Zano’s advanced privacy features, giving users a secure, censorship-resistant way to transact.

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What is Freedom Dollar (fUSD)?

Freedom Dollar (fUSD) is a decentralized, privacy-preserving stablecoin designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the U.S. dollar. Built on the Zano blockchain, fUSD combines the utility of a dollar-pegged digital currency with advanced privacy technologies, offering a censorship-resistant way to transact while keeping balances and transfers confidential.

Origins and Purpose

Launched in January 2025, fUSD was created to provide an alternative to conventional stablecoins, many of which rely on centralized issuers and are subject to regulatory control or blacklisting. The development of fUSD was motivated by growing concerns over financial surveillance, the rise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and the need for a stablecoin that preserves both dollar stability and user privacy.

By anchoring its value to the U.S. dollar, fUSD provides stability for everyday payments and savings. At the same time, it leverages Zano’s privacy-focused infrastructure to protect user data, ensuring that transactions remain confidential and cannot be arbitrarily censored.

Explore the world of privacy coins and how they help defend your financial sovereignty.

The Need for Financial Freedom

Traditional financial systems present several barriers to individual sovereignty and accessibility. These include:

• Centralized control: Banks and governments can freeze accounts, block transfers, or impose restrictions.
• High fees and delays: International transfers often involve high costs and long settlement times.
• Privacy concerns: Traditional systems require extensive personal information, leaving users exposed to surveillance.
• Accessibility issues: Large populations worldwide remain unbanked or underbanked, unable to access essential financial services.
• Inflation and currency devaluation: Government-issued fiat currencies can lose purchasing power over time.

fUSD aims to address these issues by providing a stable, private, and permissionless alternative that combines the reliability of a dollar peg with the protections of decentralized technology.

Explore the importance of censorship resistance in decentralized systems and the concept of unstoppable money.

How fUSD Works

Unlike traditional stablecoins backed by custodial reserves of dollars in bank accounts, fUSD is issued directly on Zano’s blockchain as a Confidential Asset. This means it inherits Zano’s default privacy protections while operating without centralized oversight or reliance on traditional banking infrastructure.

• Collateralization: fUSD is over-collateralized with ZANO, Zano’s native token. At launch, the collateral ratio exceeded 10×, providing a strong buffer to maintain its dollar peg.
• Staked reserves: Staked reserves: The ZANO collateral is staked within the protocol, generating rewards that are added to reserves over time, strengthening the system’s backing.
• Algorithmic balancing:　Algorithmic balancing: A combination of over-collateralization and algorithmic market-making mechanisms helps maintain the fUSD peg without dependence on centralized issuers.

These mechanisms are designed to ensure that fUSD maintains its stability while remaining censorship-resistant and private. Like other digital currencies, users should also practice strong digital asset security measures when holding or transacting fUSD to protect their funds.

Privacy Features

Zano’s blockchain architecture incorporates advanced cryptographic tools to provide strong privacy at the protocol level. These same features apply to fUSD transactions:

• Ring signatures obscure the true sender among a group of possible signers.
• Stealth addresses ensure that recipient identities cannot be traced on the public ledger.
• Confidential transactions hide the transferred amount as well as the type of asset being sent.

This is possible because fUSD is built on Zano’s Confidential Assets framework. Confidential Assets are tokens on the Zano blockchain that automatically inherit the network’s privacy features: the sender and recipient are hidden, the amount is concealed, and even the type of asset being transferred is obscured. In practice, this means fUSD transactions reveal nothing beyond the fact that a transfer occurred.

As the first live example of a Confidential Asset, fUSD also benefits from deeper cryptographic protections. Zano’s design extends Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) with unlimited decoy mixing and asset tag surjection proofs, ensuring that even in complex multi-asset transfers, both the type and the amount remain fully private. At the same time, these proofs guarantee that every transaction can be verified by the network without exposing sensitive information.

Use Cases

Freedom Dollar is designed for practical, real-world applications where stability and privacy are both required:

• Everyday payments: fUSD can be used for goods and services without exposing personal transaction histories.
• Savings and remittances: As a dollar-pegged asset, it shields users from crypto market volatility while enabling low-cost global transfers, including confidential remittances that protect sender and recipient details. Compared to traditional payment systems, these transactions can avoid high banking charges and instead rely on relatively small crypto transaction fees.
• Donations and political support: Provides a way for individuals and organizations to contribute without fear of financial deplatforming. For example, a recent $100,000 fUSD donation celebrating Ron Paul’s 90th birthday highlighted how Freedom Dollar can be used to support political expression. You can also watch our video breakdown of the event.
• Alternative to CBDCs: Offers a private, permissionless counterpart to state-issued digital currencies.
• Cross-border transactions: Enabling fast and low-cost global payments without reliance on banks or remittance services.
• DeFi applications: As adoption grows, fUSD will be integrated into more decentralized finance platforms for lending, borrowing, and other services, with the added benefit of confidential lending and trading that obscure balances. Learn more about DeFi use cases.
• Financial inclusion: Offering access to stable money and financial tools for those excluded from traditional banking systems.
• Enterprise-grade tokens: Built on Zano’s Confidential Asset framework, fUSD demonstrates how shielded tokens can also serve business use cases, enabling sensitive transactions such as payroll or internal settlement to be conducted privately.

Integration and Access

fUSD is available through several exchanges, including MEXC, AscendEX, Biconomy, and XT.COM. It is also supported by major self-custodial wallets. Importantly, both fUSD and Zano are integrated directly into the Bitcoin.com Wallet app, making it easy for users to hold, send, and receive these assets alongside Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. As a Confidential Asset, fUSD can be transacted with full privacy in supported wallets, and the same framework will extend to other Confidential Assets issued on Zano. Additional support is provided by Zano’s own wallet, as well as popular options like Cake Wallet and Edge Wallet.

Comparing fUSD to Other Stablecoins

fUSD stands out within the stablecoin landscape:

• USDT and USDC: These leading stablecoins are centralized, backed by fiat reserves, and subject to issuer blacklisting.
• USDS (formerly DAI): A decentralized stablecoin under Sky Protocol, but its transactions are fully transparent on Ethereum.
• fUSD: Combines decentralization with privacy. It preserves stability without relying on a central custodian and ensures that transaction details remain confidential.

fUSD is one of the first stablecoins to fully integrate privacy protections at the protocol level through Zano’s Confidential Assets.

While fUSD aims to improve on the limitations of legacy stablecoins, it helps to understand how others like USDT, USDC, and USDS work.

Looking Ahead

Freedom Dollar represents a significant step forward in the evolution of digital money. By uniting the stability of the dollar with the privacy protections of Zano, it provides a tool for financial freedom in an increasingly surveilled global economy.

By combining the stability of the U.S. dollar with Zano’s privacy infrastructure, fUSD directly responds to long-standing issues in traditional finance - centralized control, lack of access, privacy loss, and inflationary pressures. In doing so, it demonstrates how digital money can expand financial freedom while remaining practical for everyday use.

Adoption is still in its early stages, but with growing support across wallets, exchanges, and point-of-sale systems, fUSD demonstrates how stablecoins can evolve beyond transparency and control, toward a model that prioritizes sovereignty, confidentiality, and open access.

You can explore the project further at the official Zano website and Freedom Dollar website.