Zano Monthly Project Update #12 - September 2025

Gonbatfire -

Welcome zAnons to the 12th Zano Project Update!
September was a month marked by significant progress and new opportunities for the Zano ecosystem. From a major update to Zano Trade to new listings and integrations, the pace of growth continues to accelerate. And perhaps most exciting of all, big steps have been taken toward bringing Confidential Layer into the hands of more users. Stay tuned as we dive into all the details!

Community Member of the Month

This month’s award goes to Jaiyonex! As one of the most active members of our Discord, he’s currently the top non-staff participant on the leaderboard. Jaiyonex brings consistent curiosity and engagement to discussions, often creating thoughtful conversations across different topics. He’s also a strong Confidential Layer supporter, showing great interest in the project’s ecosystem potential. We appreciate such genuine excitement and the energy he brings to the community. Thank you!

Zano Fact  #1: You can now load fUSD to a Zebec Mastercard and spend it anywhere Mastercard is accepted, with near-zero fees. Watch the full step-by-step guide here.

Zano Trade just got a new look!

Our new UI overhaul is live, with further improvements on the way.

What is Zano Trade?

Zano Trade is a decentralized private trading platform, designed to overcome the flaws of first-generation DEXs:

  • Private Trades. Swaps are indistinguishable from regular Zano transactions.
  • NO MEV. Say goodbye to front-running and unfair trading advantages.
  • NO Custodians. You always stay in control of your funds.
  • NO User Registration. Start trading instantly, without barriers.

Try out the new UI today! trade.zano.org

Zano Fact  #2: Did you know that over 71% of Zano’s supply is being staked? Meaning that most of our marketcap is directly securing the network, plus every staker is required to run their own full node.

Ecosystem Growth and Integrations

ZanoMap.com now displays all Swiss SPAR locations where ZANO is accepted, thanks to OpenCryptoPay.

Technical Upgrades

September was focused on deep protocol-level preparations for the upcoming Hardfork 6 (HF6), wallet RPC hardening, test infrastructure upgrades, and continued work on the mobile-to-desktop transition. Here's a full breakdown of the work completed across core, frontend, and mobile layers:

Core, Protocol & Testing

Hardfork 6 Preparations

  • Refactoring is underway to support per-output payment IDs, while maintaining compatibility with legacy transaction-wide payment IDs. This will enhance transaction uniformness and privacy moving forward.

Consensus & Fork Choice Improvements

  • Implemented minor but experimental updates to the fork choice rule, fixing HF control paths for edge-case reorganizations.
  • Fixed an issue with re-submitting already existing transactions that could cause inconsistencies during mempool validation.

Wallet & RPC Enhancements

  • submit_transfer now performs sanity checks on all key images and rejects reused ones.
  • New error code: WALLET_RPC_ERROR_CODE_KEY_IMAGE_ALREADY_SPENT
  • get_wallet_info now supports a collect_utxo_data flag, providing detailed UTXO stats on request.
  • Fixed issue #583 related to authenticated HTTP wallet RPC calls.
  • Fixed log formatting for decimal precision in wallet logs.
  • Added --no-idle-unlock-utxo option to simplewallet to prevent automatic unlocking of UTXOs when idle.

LMDB & Drive-Specific Issues

Further investigation was conducted into rare LMDB instability observed only on specific types of external drives. Research is ongoing.

SSL Certificate Handling

Temporarily reverted changes to SSL certificate verification while working on a cross-platform fix.

Testing & Mainnet Builds

  • Added new test: pos_and_no_pow_blocks_between_output_and_stake.
  • Introduced wallet_rpc_hardfork_verification to validate core-wallet sync logic across forks.
  • Switched automated testing pipeline to mainnet-targeted builds for higher. confidence in production environments.
  • Continued improvements to core test coverage and stability.

Frontend & Governance

Governance Infrastructure

  • Added Zano Governance proposal documentation.
  • Finalized and deployed the voting frontend, with live testing of proposal submission and voting starting this week.

Mobile (And Desktop Remote Node App)

  • Work on the mobile-to-desktop transition continued this month, with most of the work focused on Windows support.
  • The Zano native library (zano_native_lib) was refactored to make future integrations easier, both for desktop ports and third-party apps.
  • In ZanoBrowser, each tab now holds its own selected wallet, offering more flexibility when interacting with multiple services. Wallet selection defaults to none but can be adjusted in settings.
  • We’ve also started rolling out deep link support, allowing seamless integration with external services:
    - zano://transfer/?address=&amount=&asset_id=&comment= → Opens the Send screen with prefilled data
    - zano://browser/?link=... → Opens the target URL directly inside ZanoBrowser.
  • If any required parameters are missing, the app gracefully defaults to the standard transfer screen.
  • The QR scanner now supports all known Zano URI formats:
    - The new deep link format
    - The legacy short format (zano:action=send&address=...)
    - Even older formats (zano:<address>?amount=...) used by some external services.
  • On Android, Zano now uses edge-to-edge display mode, making full use of the screen space.
  • In a push for greater user safety:
    - Assets you create in your own wallet are still locally whitelisted.
    - Assets received from others are not considered whitelisted by default anymore.
    - The Asset Details screen now displays a clear disclaimer indicating whether. an asset is globally whitelisted, locally whitelisted, or not whitelisted at all.

Released Content & Coverage

Zano Fact  #3: Did you know you can buy gift cards using $ZANO on ZanoX.io and even participate in a Zano lottery?

Zano Around the World

Zano Africa‌‌
September was an energetic month for the Zano African community. We held our usual quiz games, with at least 50 players in each, and many new community members joined our Telegram and WhatsApp groups, all in anticipation of our highly anticipated community meet-up in Kaduna.

Zano Latam/Spain
This month we focused on spreading more informative content about the new Zano features. We worked with a KOL that helped us to share these features with new and more people. Our new goal now is to leverage the potential of the new integrations and features that have made Zano more user-friendly, in order to drive adoption among Spanish speakers. In addition, we aim to create content so that those who become interested in this language can easily access the information.

Zano Brazil
In September, we hosted AMAs to answer community questions about the Confidential Layer bridge, released a tutorial video showing how to use it step-by-step, and started preparing for ETH Latam (São Paulo) and Devcon (Buenos Aires), where we’ll be representing and promoting Zano.

Miscellaneous

Aaron Day released freedomforge.io, a website that will help you with some convenient tools to start using and learning about Zano. The website contains:

  • An overview of dApps on Zano
  • Threats and solutions
  • Various guides
  • Workshops
  • Collaboration opportunities and much more!
https://freedomforge.io/

Conclusion

Last month showed just how quickly the Zano ecosystem is evolving. New integrations, a renewed trading experience, and ongoing protocol work are paving the way for the future of a private digital ecosystem. As always, it’s the passion and support of our community that makes this growth possible. Stay tuned for more, and we’ll see you in the next update, zAnons!

To help fund Core-Team Zano development, please consider donating here ("Get-Involved" Section).