What is Zano?
Zano is a privacy-first layer 1 blockchain on which every transaction is private by default. It hides the sender, the receiver, the amount and even which asset was sent, at the protocol level and for everyone. Anyone can also issue a token on Zano, called a Confidential Asset, with the same privacy as the coin itself; the best known is Freedom Dollar (fUSD), a private dollar stablecoin.
ZANO is the network's native coin. It pays the fee for every transaction, including fUSD transfers, and rewards the miners and stakers who produce blocks. Zano went live in 2019. Its lead developer, Andrey Sabelnikov, wrote the original CryptoNote code that Monero and hundreds of other privacy coins were built from.
Zano at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Type | Privacy-first layer 1 blockchain |
| Native asset | ZANO |
| Launched | 2019, as the successor to Boolberry |
How Zano keeps transactions private
Bitcoin and Ethereum record every address and amount on a public ledger. Zano hides those details with three techniques from the CryptoNote family:
Ring signatures hide the sender. Each payment is signed on behalf of 16 possible senders, the real one and 15 decoys, and an observer cannot tell which one spent the coins.
Stealth addresses hide the receiver. You can publish one address, but every payment to it lands at a new one-time address that only you can recognize and spend from.
Commitments hide the amount and the asset. Amounts are sealed in cryptographic commitments with Bulletproofs+ range proofs, so the network can check that no coins were created from nothing without seeing any numbers. The asset type is blinded too.
Because no coin carries a visible history, every ZANO is interchangeable with every other, the property known as fungibility. The research firm Cypher Stack has reviewed Zano's ring signatures and its private staking design.
Some limits are deliberate. Auditable wallets are an opt-in type whose balance and history anyone with its tracking seed can check, while only the owner can spend; Zano's foundation fund uses one. A registered alias is public, bridged assets are visible on their public chain, and the protocol does not hide your IP address.
Mining and private staking: how Zano is secured
Zano's consensus mechanism alternates proof of work blocks with proof of stake blocks, roughly one a minute. An attacker would need a large share of both the mining power and the staked coins at once, which is why Zano can keep its 1 ZANO block reward small.
Mining: proof-of-work blocks use ProgPowZ, an algorithm built to resist specialized ASIC machines, so ZANO is mined with graphics cards.
Staking: proof-of-stake blocks use Zarcanum, live since the Zarcanum hard fork on 21 March 2024, which Zano calls the first proof-of-stake scheme with hidden amounts. There is no minimum, no lock-up and no slashing, but staking ZANO needs a full node that stays synced and online, which today means Zano's own desktop wallet or a command-line node.
Voting: since October 2025, stakers have signalled on ecosystem proposals, such as which assets official wallets show, with each block they find during a vote counting as one vote. Protocol decisions stay with the core team.
Zenith: published in July 2026, this design would move Zano to pure proof of stake with 15-second blocks and end mining. The roadmap targets mainnet around the second quarter of 2027.
ZANO supply, emission and fees
ZANO has no maximum supply. About 15.4 million ZANO existed on 7 October 2026, and the live circulating supply is shown in the market data on this page.
Genesis: Zano's first block in 2019 created 17,517,203 ZANO: 13,827,203 for holders of Boolberry (BBR), the team's earlier coin, to swap one for one, and 3.69 million as a premine. About 7.8 million BBR were swapped, and the roughly 6 million unclaimed ZANO were burned.
Foundation fund: Zano had no ICO and no venture funding; the premine pays for development and is mostly spent. In July 2026 the fund held about 440,000 ZANO, roughly 2.9% of supply, in an auditable wallet anyone can check.
Emission and fees: every block pays a fixed 1 ZANO, around half a million ZANO a year, or roughly 3% of today's supply and a smaller share each year. Each transaction pays a flat 0.01 ZANO fee, and all fees are burned. Only a far busier network than today's would burn more than is issued.
Confidential Assets, aliases and the Zano ecosystem
Since the Zarcanum hard fork, anyone can issue a token on Zano without running a separate blockchain. These Confidential Assets get the same hidden addresses, amounts and asset type as ZANO. Read more in what are Confidential Assets on Zano?
Zano has no general-purpose smart contracts, a trade-off for privacy, so its apps are built around these assets:
Ionic Swaps and Zano Trade: an Ionic Swap exchanges any two Zano assets in one transaction that both people sign, with no one holding the funds in between. Zano Trade, a decentralized exchange with no accounts and no custody, settles every trade this way.
Aliases: a public @name of 6 to 25 lower-case letters and numbers, registered on chain, that people can pay instead of a long address. Payments still go to stealth addresses, so the name reveals no balance or history. More than 15,000 were registered by October 2026.
Other apps: Obscura mints private NFTs, Zano Matrix is a messenger that uses your alias as your identity, and Zano Bay is a private marketplace.
Freedom Dollar (fUSD): a private stablecoin on Zano
Freedom Dollar (fUSD) is a US dollar stablecoin issued as a Confidential Asset. It launched on 5 January 2025 as the first private stablecoin on Zano, with the same privacy as ZANO.
fUSD is backed by ZANO, not by dollars in a bank. Swapping ZANO for fUSD through its protocol issues new fUSD against ZANO that joins a public, staked reserve. Because the backing is ZANO, its dollar value moves with ZANO's price: the Freedom Dollar site publishes a live coverage ratio, which can fall below one when ZANO drops. Every fUSD transfer pays its fee in ZANO. Read more in what is Freedom Dollar (fUSD)?
Bridges: Wrapped ZANO, Confidential Layer and Hard Fork 6
A crypto bridge moves value between Zano and public blockchains. Two run today, and a third route was switched on and then paused in 2026.
Wrapped ZANO (WZANO): an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, available since 2021 and redeemable one for one for ZANO. The ZANO behind it sits in a custody wallet run by the Zano team, which publishes it for anyone to verify. Like any Ethereum token, WZANO is fully public.
Confidential Layer: a non-custodial bridge on the Bridgeless network, launched on 31 July 2025. It brings BTC, BCH, ETH and other assets into Zano as private wrapped Confidential Assets such as BTCX and ETHX, secured by a network of validators rather than one custodian.
Hard Fork 6: activated on 26 August 2026 at block 3,833,000. Its main feature, Gateway Addresses, is an account-style address type that exchanges and bridges can integrate easily, meant to let native ZANO move to Ethereum, Solana and TON without a custodian. Amounts entering and leaving a Gateway Address are public by design.
The September 2026 exploit and rollback
A missing check in Gateway Addresses let an attacker mint unauthorized ZANO and a huge amount of fake fUSD between 29 August and 25 September 2026. After internal monitoring flagged it on 25 September, the team asked the network to halt activity. On 27 September node operators adopted an emergency release that restarted the chain from block 3,833,000, where Hard Fork 6 began, and switched Gateway Addresses off, erasing about a month of transactions. Zano says Gateway Addresses will return only after review, audit and testing. It plans to compensate affected users from its development fund and contributors' money rather than by issuing new ZANO, but had not published the details by early October. User keys and normal transaction privacy were not affected.
Zano vs Monero
Zano and Monero share CryptoNote roots, but Zano is not a fork of Monero. Monero focuses on private digital cash; Zano adds private tokens, staking and on-chain names to the same kind of privacy.
| Feature | Zano | Monero |
|---|
Who created Zano, and what comes next?
Zano was co-founded in 2018 by Andrey Sabelnikov and Pavel Nikienkov. From 2012 to 2014 Sabelnikov was the lead developer of CryptoNote, and in 2014 he launched Boolberry, Zano's predecessor. Zano's mainnet went live in 2019, and the core team publishes monthly project updates.
The next big build is the Zano Execution Layer (ZEL), a separate, public chain connected to Zano that would run Ethereum-style smart contracts beside the private base layer. As of October 2026 it is on testnet only, with no fixed mainnet date.
Risks to know
ZANO's price can move sharply in either direction, and as a smaller coin it trades with far less liquidity than the largest cryptocurrencies. Privacy coins face growing regulatory pressure: some exchanges have delisted them in certain countries, and from July 2027 EU anti-money-laundering rules will stop regulated crypto service providers from handling them. New protocol code can fail, as the September 2026 exploit showed, and a rollback can erase transactions that looked final. fUSD depends on the value of its ZANO reserve, WZANO on a custodian, and every bridge adds its own risks. Scammers copy wallets and support accounts, so install wallets only from official sources and never share your recovery phrase. This page explains how Zano works and is not financial advice.
Hold and swap ZANO with Bitcoin.com
The self-custody Bitcoin.com Wallet supports the Zano network: you can hold, send and receive ZANO and fUSD, send to an @alias or register your own, and swap into ZANO from coins you already hold. ZANO can't be bought directly in the app, so if you're new to crypto, buy BTC first and swap it. Staking still needs Zano's own desktop wallet. To see what your ZANO is worth in dollars, use the ZANO to USD converter. You keep your own keys, so always store your recovery phrase safely.