Zano Monthly Project Update #15 - December 2025

Welcome zAnons to the 15th Zano Project Update!

As we close out 2025, December has been a month of reflection, planning, and celebration. The Zano team gathered for a week-long strategic planning session that will shape our 2026 roadmap, while the community continued to grow with record-breaking meetups. Let's dive into everything that happened this month!

Community Member of the Month

Huge congratulations to Lil-king for this month's well-deserved recognition! For over two years, Lil-king has been one of Zano's most dedicated supporters, but what truly sets him apart is his extraordinary work building grassroots adoption in Africa.

He founded and manages Zano Africa (@ZanoAfrica), the largest and most active regional Zano community, with nearly 700 members on Telegram and over 800 on WhatsApp. Lil-king keeps his communities thriving with weekly activities including Zano quizzes, educational sessions, and community awards. He has also organized multiple successful Zano meetups across Africa, bringing people together in person to learn about privacy technology. His passion for privacy isn't abstract or theoretical. In Nigeria, where cryptocurrency usage is growing exponentially, financial privacy is a genuine necessity. Lil-king understands this firsthand, and his thousands of hours of dedication reflect a commitment to real-world use cases, not speculation.

We're incredibly grateful for everything he has done to expand Zano's reach, and we're thrilled that we'll finally meet him in person at the next Monerotopia conference. Thank you, Lil-king, for showing us what true community building looks like!

Zano Fact #1: Zano's Confidential Assets are not theoretical, check out the LIVE applications including private stablecoins, NFTs, and cross-chain bridges. Learn more here.

Zano Team Meetup: 2026 Vision

The Zano team just completed a week long strategic planning session, mapping out priorities for 2026. During the meetup, we asked ourselves critical questions to advance Zano's mission: building fast, scalable, privacy-by-default infrastructure that empowers individuals and institutions to participate in the digital economy with complete confidentiality.

Key Focus Areas:

• Next-Generation Consensus: How do we ensure network security as we scale? our co-founder and core-dev Andrey Sabelnikov achieved a breakthrough in consensus architecture that will be implemented in 2026 to enhance security and scalability.
• Finality Improvements: How do we improve Zano's finality time? With the upcoming consensus upgrade we're achieving transaction confirmation speeds that rival transparent blockchains.
• Zano Trade DEX Enhancement: How do we improve the Zano Trade private P2P trading experience? We're enhancing Zano Trade's UX/UI to make private P2P trading more intuitive and accessible.
• Zano Lite Wallet: How do we make Zano's privacy accessible to everyone? We're focusing on getting the Zano Lite Wallet live so anyone with a basic internet connection can access Zano.
• Broader Adoption Strategy: How do we expand real-world adoption? We'll be focusing on partnerships, new marketing campaigns, and use cases that bring privacy infrastructure to everyday transactions.

Privacy infrastructure requires constant evolution. The 2026 roadmap is locked in, and execution starts now. Additional information and the updated roadmap will be released in a soon upcoming blogpost!

Events and Announcements

The Bridge to Zano Contest wrapped up with fantastic community participation! Congratulations to all winners who showcased why privacy matters when bridging cross-chain assets.

Zano Fact #2: Buy your groceries privately with ZANO at over 100 SPAR supermarkets across Switzerland powered by DFX and OpenCryptoPay (Available in Cake Wallet). Real world utility, zero surveillance.

Ecosystem Growth and Integrations

New Integration: ZANO is now available on ChangeHero!

Technical Upgrades

As 2025 comes to a close, December focused on infrastructure stability, explorer performance, Zano Wallet improvements, and final touches to long-term research. Here's a full breakdown of what was delivered:

Zano Mobile v3.0.1 Released

Improved asset management, better offline functionality, and enhanced browsing:

• Global whitelist support for asset logos
• Globally whitelisted assets now visible even with zero balance
• Improved browser handling for external links
• Enhanced ability to work independently without online services
• Fixed wrapping $ZANO into Ethereum
• Improved internal browser search through history and bookmarks

Core, Wallet & Desktop

Predownload Updates

• Mainnet predownload files updated to height 3,451,000, including unpruned versions
• Testnet predownload files updated to height 424,500

Wallet & RPC

• Implemented portable_storage memory limits in wallet RPC proxy to prevent edge-case overuse
• Fixed an issue where wallets with zero native ZANO balance were not properly reflected in the balance map
• Enforced wallet resync for older builds to resolve a Boost serialization issue related to transaction_prefix

CLI & Daemon Enhancements

• Simplewallet: Added --concise-mode option for cleaner output in specific use cases
• Added check_all_tx_keys command to list stored secret transaction keys
• Daemon: added version command to display build version at runtime
• Released version 2.1.12.443

Networking & P2P

• Fixed a potential issue with unsolicited P2P requests
• Hardened P2P command limits to prevent misuse
• Increased connection reliability and protection under high network load

GUI

Fixed Linux launcher icon issues and resolved a bug causing failures on double-click launch

Research & Protocol Design

• Continued progress on Zarcanum-based Pure PoS consensus, with simulation testing ongoing
• Advanced the gateway address feature, which lays the foundation for future service interoperability and cross-chain bridging

Web & Explorer

Significant improvements were made to both the frontend and backend of the Zano Explorer:

Frontend

• Improved general UI responsiveness
• Optimized load speeds for all key pages
• Fixed alt blocks page (previously stuck at zero)
• Improved accuracy and load times for charts
• Increased search precision for aliases and assets

Backend

• Full internal refactor for performance and maintainability
• Accelerated search speeds for blocks, transactions, and aliases
• Improved the precision of ZANO burned statistics

Mobile & Zano Companion

December focused on browser polish, infrastructure automation, and stability for mobile users.

Infrastructure

• The CI/CD pipeline now handles full builds of libzano and its native dependencies to eliminate manual errors

Wallet & Browser Fixes

• Placeholder UI now appears when price API is unavailable
• Improved alias search UI
• Fixed keyboard behavior in address fields (triggered via "new tab")
• Resolved issues with missing favicons in web apps
• Updated design for unsupported link handling in the internal browser
• Fixed inconsistent background styling during scroll
• Fixed a bug where browser tabs occasionally loaded blank

Companion & Wallet Features

• ZanoCompanion continues evolving with UI support for key wallet actions
• Asset balances are now formatted consistently with improved precision display
• Improved asset whitelist screen clarity
• Settings screen reorganized for better usability
• Added predefined daemon node URLs for faster setup
• Added input validation and error handling for high-precision amount inputs
• Added a loading state when reading wallet files after authorization

Ongoing Work

• The team is continuing work on the lightweight desktop client, based on the mobile codebase and designed for use with remote nodes

Media Content & Coverage

Quality interview with Bitcoin.com News! Check out this conversation with Zano co-founder Pavel Ravaga discussing Bitcoin's future, PoW limitations, and privacy blockchains:

Zano Fact #3: We have an active presence across all major social platforms including Instagram (@zano_project) for ecosystem updates and education. Follow us there!

Zano Around the World

Zano Africa
December was an amazing way to wrap up 2025 with three standout moments for the Zano community: a Zano Fit and Learn meetup that welcomed over 250 attendees, a pizza hangout with top influencers, and Zano packs delivered to 15 enthusiastic community members in appreciation of their consistent support throughout the year.

Zano Latam/Spain
This month, we grew by about 10% in followers and saw a significant increase in community engagement. We now have people asking about Zano, showing trust, investing, and suggesting updates, and for the first time we are seeing organic debates. In addition, over the past few days we have started a new strategy that will be implemented throughout January.

Zano Indonesia
Zano Indonesia saw strong growth. Instagram hit 330 followers (+73%) and TikTok reached 2,388 followers (+3%). While X (Twitter) and Telegram remain steady, we're active in Twitter Spaces and offline crypto events to boost Zano's brand awareness and tech education.

Zano Venezuela
Zano Venezuela grew 20% this month with a community that is more active than ever! In the first quarter, we will launch audiovisual guides and practical tutorials on how to use all of Zano's technology. Get ready to learn! 🇻🇪🚀

Conclusion

What a year it's been! December brought us together in Dubai to chart the course for 2026, and the clarity we've gained is energizing. With Zano's TVL now crossing $18 million, every metric points in the right direction. As we step into the new year, we carry with us the lessons of 2025 and a concrete roadmap for what's ahead. Thank you for being part of this journey, zAnons. The best is yet to come. Have an amazing 2026!

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