Zano Monthly Project Update #18 - March 2026

Gonbatfire

• 8 min read
Zano Monthly Project Update #18 - March 2026

Welcome zAnons to the 18th Zano Project Update!

March was the month gateway addresses went from promise to proof on testnet. On its dedicated blog post we explained exactly how Hardfork 6 will change the integration game, while the on-chain voting system fired back up for a new round of community decisions. On the ecosystem side, real-world spending with $ZANO and Confidential Assets keeps getting easier. Let's dive in!

Gateway Addresses: The Road to Hardfork 6

We dedicated a full blog post to this one, and for good reason. Gateway addresses are the centerpiece of Hardfork 6, and they're already live on testnet and being put through their paces. In short, gateway addresses provide account-based addresses purpose-built for exchanges, bridges, and decentralized infrastructure, while standard Zano wallets remain fully private. They support permissionless registration (with a $ZANO burn fee), work with Confidential Assets, and open the door to future DEX integrations.

Read the full deep-dive on gateway addresses here.

Community Member of the Month

Congratulations to Deenarh for earning this month's award! Deenarh has been a consistent contest participant with quality entries and multiple wins under his belt. He's a genuine advocate for the project, actively promoting Zano through X, and with strong participation in the Zano Africa community, where he and hundreds of zAnons keep pushing real-world adoption forward, because privacy only wins when we actually use it! Well deserved Deenarh!

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

On-Chain Voting is Back

Stakers, it's your turn again. A new round of on-chain voting is underway to decide whether $DAIx and $BNBx should be added to Zano's whitelist. These Confidential Assets would be displayed by default in all first-party wallets and featured in Zano Trade.

The voting period runs from April 1 to April 15, spanning block heights 3,621,834 through 3,641,994. Here's how to participate:

  1. Connect your wallet at vote.zano.org via Zano Companion
  2. Download your Vote.json and place it in your Zano data folder
  3. Restart your wallet and start staking
  4. Your voting power equals the PoS blocks you find during the voting period

Make your voice heard, zAnons.

Ecosystem Growth and Integrations

A busy month for the ecosystem. Here's what landed in March:

  • AEON Pay partnership went live. You can now spend $ZANO at 50+ million merchants across emerging markets using QR codes or bank transfers via the Telegram Mini App. No KYC for small amounts. Read the full announcement.
  • Checkout by Bitcoin.com launched as a new mobile POS app. Merchants can now accept $ZANO and Confidential Assets ($fUSD, $BTCx, $ETHx, $BCHx) with instant QR codes, real-time exchange rates for 32 fiat currencies, and automatic payment detection. See the announcement.
  • StereoSwap listing brought $ZANO to a privacy-first instant swap platform with TOR support and zero KYC requirements. More here.
  • Unstoppable Wallet teased upcoming support for $ZANO and Confidential Assets including $fUSD in their next iOS release. Stay tuned.
  • CoinDonor, a new non-custodial donation platform, launched with support for $ZANO and $fUSD. No KYC, no platform fees per donation, 100% of gifts go straight to your wallet. Learn more.
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Event

NanoGPT contest is running with 9 of 30 spots still available at time of writing. Deposit 1 $ZANO, get 1 free $ZANO in AI credits, then create content or tools for a chance to win from a $400 prize pool. Join here.

Technical Upgrades

March was defined by intensive preparation for Hardfork 6, the upgrade that will bring gateway addresses and intrinsic payment IDs to Zano. Alongside HF6 work, the team tackled a wide range of stability and robustness improvements in the core and P2P subsystems, expanded cryptographic capabilities, and continued strengthening automated test coverage. On the ecosystem side, Zano Trade, Zano Companion, and Explorer all received meaningful updates.

Core, Protocol & Cryptography

EdDSA Support: Implemented EdDSA signing (RFC 8032 / Dalek-compatible) with extensive test coverage, including a dedicated SHA-512 implementation. Gateway addresses can now use EdDSA in addition to ECDSA and Zano's native Schnorr signature scheme, broadening interoperability options for HF6. The API was also updated to rename "eth" references to "ecdsa" for clarity.

Gateway Address & HF6 Preparation:

  • Added gateway support to validate_alt_block_txs
  • Added service entries support to gateway_create_transfer
  • Fixed tx_blob serialization in COMMAND_RPC_GATEWAY_SIGN_TRANSFER
  • Added a new RPC error code for the tx freeze period before a hardfork
  • Fixed gateway address fee calculation for testnet
  • GUI migrated to the most recent wallet_transfer_info in the wallet interface

Payment ID Handling (HF6):

  • Fixed incorrect payment ID handling for transaction inputs after receiving them with payment ID
  • Self-directed transactions are now correctly ignored in certain cases (fully self-directed with legacy PID or self-directed output with intrinsic PID)
  • Fixed generic PID handling in rpc_fill_destinations_helper
  • Implemented proper payment_id handling in simplewallet for post-HF6 behavior

Core Fixes & Hardening:

  • Fixed potential issue in alt block validation
  • Fixed validation asymmetry between the main chain and alternative chain paths
  • Fixed missing future time limit check for PoW blocks in alternative chain timestamp validation
  • Fixed check_tx_inputs_keyimages_diff in multisig handling
  • Fixed partial attachment signature check in validate_attachment_info for consolidated transactions
  • Improved zlib unpacked size limiter
  • Introduced max transaction count in pool
  • Removed the legacy torlib dependency
  • Added logging when extract_type_and_add fails in the offers subsystem

Wallet:

  • Fixed an issue with wallet2 callback being immediately lost upon wallet generation/restore in wallet manager
  • Fixed amount display for decimal point = 0 in simplewallet, plus minor improvements

P2P & Network Robustness

A P2P handshake research paper was added to the repository. Several targeted improvements to harden the P2P layer:

  • Fixed peerlist last_seen time and added shuffle for improved anonymity
  • Added per-IP incoming connection limit
  • Added inbound peerlist size validation matching the expected maximum from legitimate peers
  • Added an additional check for P2P storage limitations

Frontend & Ecosystem

Zano Trade:

  • Added the option to specify a minimum apply amount for each order
  • Improved the authorization system: alias changes now update in Zano Trade upon wallet connection
  • Added limits on the number of orders per pair, per side, per user

Zano Companion:

  • Increased balance display precision from 2 to 6 decimal points, with updated balance UI
  • Added alias creation, editing, and transfer to the UI
  • Added a new security layer: third-party websites must now request user permission before accessing balances, alias/address, or interacting with the extension

Zano Explorer:

Improved the accuracy of the Zano price API

Desktop GUI:

The desktop wallet saw a busy month of UI work. Asset loading was optimized with periodic refresh and improved component performance. The asset whitelist system was refactored to fetch and merge detailed asset descriptors. Subtransfers were restructured around a subtransfers_by_pid model to support intrinsic payment IDs. Address validation and error handling were improved, including a hot-fix for payment_id length in validateIntegratedAddress and new split_integration_address validation. The destinations logic was updated with dynamic validation via canAddOrDuplicate. Asset table columns and icon styles were refreshed, new desktop app icons were uploaded, and settings UI styles and translations were improved.

Mobile

The Zano Mobile app (v3.1.0) had an intensive month with 65+ commits across the release branch. The React Native Zano module was moved into the app and integrated from GitHub, with a dedicated Android build pipeline and new CI/CD automation with dependency caching.

App Features & Fixes:

  • Payment ID length validation and self-transfer payment ID error parsing
  • Alias editing fix and strict text sizing
  • Wallet onboarding state migration: existing wallets now skip onboarding correctly
  • Wallet close and removal handling improved
  • Broadcasting screen redesigned with a prominent spinner
  • Balance display fix in GET_WALLET_DATA
  • Swap screen destination/currency fix
  • Companion integration: wallet-busy error now surfaced properly
  • Global asset whitelist is now cached locally
  • Async storage became the default persistence layer, with batching improvements and a mechanism to wait until all data is stored before shutdown
  • Daemon URL validation and save handling
  • Auto-lock after 7 seconds in background, pin locker state improvements
  • Multiple UX fixes: exit flow (screen, action, delay), initialization state, transaction history scroll, group input submission

Desktop Porting:

Desktop builds continued to mature: gcc 13 support on Linux, Windows build fixes, a git server script for distribution, link focus handling, and a locker fix. A Windows app description was added. Prebuilt libraries were updated, Boost configured for mobile platforms, and the native lib dependency removed from the desktop build path.

Testing & QA

A strong month for test coverage. New and improved coretests include gateway address tests, HF6 intrinsic payment ID scenarios, attachment_info_validation tests, print_fixed_decimal_point unit test, and checkpoint handling regardless of prune mode state. EdDSA was enabled in the wallet_rpc_gateway_signatures test suite.

Build Release: Released Build 2.1.16.465, incorporating the above fixes and improvements.

As we head into April, the focus remains on finalizing and testing HF6 in preparation for its activation on mainnet.

Media Content & Coverage

Several clips from made the rounds this month:

Zano Fact: Book flights, hotels, and buy retail goods with $ZANO and $fUSD on ShopinBit. Real-world spending with full privacy.

Zano Around the World

Zano Africa

In March we launched the Pay with ZANO contest, inviting merchants across Nigeria and other African countries to showcase real ZANO and fUSD payments in action. Members of the African community stepped up, tested the integration firsthand and brought it to life at the merchant level. The response was bigger than expected with participants not just completing payments but actively engaging with the experience. Valuable feedback poured in from across the continent, giving us a clearer picture of what is working and what can be improved.

Zano Latam/Spain

This month was key to expanding Zano's reputation in this language. A major challenge when we started was getting people to trust Zano and care about their privacy. We've been successful in raising awareness about privacy, and after the time we've been active, we're steadily gaining credibility. We've also seen strong support from our community and new KOLs following us. We continue our work of sparking interest in privacy among the Spanish-speaking audience.

Zano Venezuela

Zano Venezuela is soaring! Our community just reached 120 followers this month. We also successfully launched the "Your Name on the Blockchain" contest, driving local onboarding and showing everyone the power of Zano's alias system. The momentum is real!

Zano Indonesia

Zano Indonesia is hitting new milestones! Our Telegram community just surpassed 350 active members. The group is buzzing with engagement as we push local adoption and education across Indonesia.

Looking Ahead

Gateway addresses are right around the corner, new on-chain voting is putting governance back in stakers' hands, and the list of places you can actually spend ZANO grew by the week.
There's a lot of momentum to carry forward, and we're not slowing down. Thank you for being part of this, zAnons. See you next month!

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