The Countdown to Hard Fork 6 Has Begun!
After more than a year of work, one of Zano’s most significant upgrades yet has arrived. Hard Fork 6 opens Zano up to the rest of crypto, while keeping the privacy at its core fully intact.
The updated wallet is live now. The network upgrade itself activates on-chain at block 3,833,000, expected between August 25 and 27, 2026. To stay in sync with the network, every user needs to update before then. Full instructions are at the bottom of this post.
What Hard Fork 6 Brings
Gateway Addresses: Gateway Addresses are a new account-based style address type built specifically for services like exchanges, bridges, and DEXes. Until now, Zano's privacy-first design made it difficult for these platforms to integrate. Gateway Addresses fix that, with a single, directly tracked balance and instant sync, so a service can connect to Zano without the heavy engineering overhead that held integrations back.
Crucially, this changes nothing about privacy for everyday users. Standard Zano addresses work exactly as before. And the impact is already in motion: conversations with Thorchain, Near Intents, Maya Protocol, and other major platforms are underway, ready to move forward once HF6 is live on mainnet.
Native $ZANO Goes Cross-Chain: Gateway Addresses unlock something Zano has never had: trustless, non-custodial bridging of native $ZANO to other blockchains. Through Bridgeless, $ZANO will be bridgeable to Ethereum, TON, and Solana with no central custodian and no single point of failure, replacing the old centralized wrapped-ZANO bridge with infrastructure built the right way.
This opens the door to DeFi, deeper liquidity, and a realistic path to tier-1 exchange listings for the first time. Two things to keep in mind: Bridgeless is still early-stage and maturing, and the moment you bridge $ZANO to a transparent chain you leave Zano's privacy behind until you bridge back. For privacy, native $ZANO on the Zano chain remains home.
Under the Hood: HF6 also ships a wave of security, privacy, and reliability improvements:
• Stronger consensus: tighter, more uniform validation rules and a more decisive fork-choice rule mean stronger network-wide agreement and a more solid base layer.
• Hardened wallet encryption: your wallet file now uses stronger encryption, making a stolen or copied file far harder to crack.
• Per-output payment IDs: each output carries its own payment ID, so exchanges and merchants can match payments cleanly, with recipient privacy fully intact.
• More resilient mining pools: pools can now dry-run a block before finalizing it, dropping bad transactions automatically instead of stalling.
• Tougher, more private nodes: new anti-DoS limits harden the network, and node operators can now route traffic through a proxy like Tor via SOCKS5.
• Safer developer surface: the RPC interfaces used to build on Zano have been hardened for safer integrations.
For Those Who Run a Full-Node Desktop Wallet
Updating is quick and easy, and you can simply install the new wallet without deleting your older one. If you do not update before the fork activates, your wallet will be left on an outdated version that no longer follows the network.
- Update your wallet. Download and install the latest Zano wallet from https://zano.org/wallets
- Let it resync. Open the wallet and allow it to fully resync with the network.
- Do this before block 3,833,000 (expected between August 25 and 27, 2026). Once you are updated and synced, you are ready, and there is nothing else you need to do.
Running a node, pool, or service? Make sure your infrastructure is updated to the HF6 release ahead of activation as well. Find a guide here.
A Huge Milestone
This is the result of over a year of focused work, and one of the most significant steps in Zano's history. The mission behind it is simple: make Zano usable and accessible for the world, without ever compromising the privacy that defines it.
Thank you for being part of it, zAnons!
