Zano Monthly Project Update #21 - June 2026

Welcome zAnons to the 21st Zano Project Update!
June was the month Zano crossed the finish line on preparations for Hard Fork 6. After more than a year of focused work, the activation height is now locked in. Alongside that milestone, the team shipped a wave of security hardening across Companion, Trade, the SDK, and mobile, while the ecosystem kept expanding places you can swap and spend $ZANO. Let's dive in!

• Hard Fork 6: Preparations Finalized
• Official Support Page
• Moving from Discord to the Zano Forum
• Events
• Ecosystem Growth and Integrations
• Technical Upgrades
• Zano Around the World
• Looking Ahead

Hard Fork 6: Preparations Finalized

HF6 preparation is finished. The activation height is set to block 3,833,000, expected between August 25 and 27, 2026. The updated wallet is live now, and every user, node operator, pool, and service needs to update before the fork activates to stay in sync with the network.

Gateway Addresses are the headline feature: an account-based style address type built for exchanges, bridges, and DEXes, without changing privacy for everyday users on standard Zano addresses. That unlock also opens the path for trustless native $ZANO bridging via Bridgeless once HF6 is live on mainnet.

Full details are in the announcement: The Countdown to Hard Fork 6 Has Begun. Exchanges and services should follow the dedicated HF6 services migration guide to update infrastructure ahead of activation.

Zano Fact #1: Did you know Zano has community ambassadors in seven countries? Nigeria, France, Spain, Indonesia, Venezuela, India, and now Brazil is being reactivated. Each has a local presence translating, educating, and onboarding new users in their language and time zone.

Official Support Page

Need help with Zano? There is now an official support page at support.zano.org. Open a ticket, and the team will get back to you by email. Categories cover general support, wallet help, technical issues, and scam or impersonation reports.

Due to an increase in scam attempts, the team will no longer provide technical or wallet support via Telegram or Discord. Those channels stay for simple questions only. The support page is the only official place to get help with your wallet or funds. The Zano team will never DM you first, ask for your seed phrase, or offer help anywhere else. If someone claiming to be Zano support reaches out on another platform, it is a scam. Always start on support.zano.org.

Moving from Discord to the Zano Forum

Discord has become a magnet for impersonators targeting the community, and it is no longer workable as the primary support and discussion channel. To protect users and maintain trustworthy conversations, Zano is retiring Discord as its main hub and launching the Zano Forum as its replacement.

The forum will use alias-based authentication: your identity is tied to your on-chain Zano alias rather than an easily spoofed username. Because aliases are registered on the blockchain and cannot be altered or impersonated the way a Discord handle can, this closes the door on fake "support agent" and lookalike-admin scams.

Discord.gg/zano will no longer be supported. The new invitation link is Discord.gg/YfXMqkXrm. The Discord server stays active but locked down, so it remains visible and harder for scammers to set up convincing fake Zano Discords. More details on the migration timeline and forum access with your alias will follow soon.

Events

The Zano team is attending Common S3nse this year, a conference and hackathon organized by CryptoCanal focused on privacy, security, cryptography, decentralized systems, and liberty. It is designed for thoughtful conversations and technical collaboration, without sales-driven agendas.

• When: September 4 and 5, 2026
• Where: De Hallen Studio's, Amsterdam
• Tickets: use code ZANO-FRENS for 20% off
• If you are attending, come say hello! Get your tickets here.

Ecosystem Growth and Integrations

June metrics stayed healthy: more $ZANO burned, more aliases and assets on-chain, and solid confirmed transaction volume even as average transactions per block cooled a bit after May's spike. TVL across active projects held near the $25M mark. Here is where else $ZANO showed up this month.

• PrivacyGateway card: You can now top up the PrivacyGateway card with $ZANO. No KYC, 0% fees on USD purchases, spend anywhere VISA is accepted, top up anytime with a monthly spend limit of up to $10,000, and pay the $60 annual subscription directly in $ZANO. $fUSD support is in the works.

• CardsRelay: Spend $ZANO on a digital goods marketplace with over 1,400 gift cards and mobile top-ups across 160+ countries, including Amazon, Steam, and Netflix. Transparent pricing, no account registration, codes delivered by email within minutes of payment confirmation.

• sshwap: Swap $ZANO through a terminal-UI crypto swapper accessible over SSH. It runs on any device with a terminal and SSH client, including low-bandwidth links and meshnets like Reticulum. No browser means no JS and no fingerprinting, with clearnet, Tor, and I2P access.

• fswap: Swap $ZANO on fswap.io, a fully automated crypto exchange with no registration, fast swaps from about two minutes, and support for 4,000+ cryptocurrencies. Another registration-free on-ramp whenever you need it.

Zano Fact #2: The entire Zano codebase is open source, so anyone can check exactly how it works: how transactions stay private, how the network reaches agreement, and how wallets handle funds. No hidden cryptography, no "trust us." You can verify it all yourself.

Technical Upgrades

June was all about crossing the finish line on Hard Fork 6. After more than a year of work, HF6 preparation is complete, the release is out, and the activation height is locked in. Alongside the fork itself, the team shipped a wave of core hardening, wallet and RPC fixes, and security-focused updates across the web and mobile ecosystem.

Hard Fork 6: Finalized

HF6 preparation is finished. The activation height is set to block 3,833,000, expected between August 25 and 27, 2026. The updated wallet is live now, and every user, node operator, pool, and service needs to update before the fork activates to stay in sync with the network.

Once again: Exchanges and services should follow the dedicated HF6 services migration guide to update their infrastructure ahead of activation.

Core, Protocol & Research

Most of the month's core work went into finalizing HF6 behavior and hardening the protocol.

• Refined the max allowed inputs check, now active from HF5, to correctly account for early HF4 transactions that carried unusually large numbers of legacy bare inputs
• Fixed a potential out-of-bounds issue in check_tx_input() for gateway inputs under HF6
• Fixed a rare race condition in the timestamps median cache
• Improved handling of bare inputs and outputs with respect to potential overflow
• Added a new consensus rule: gateway outputs are incompatible with legacy transaction-wide payment IDs as of HF6

Privacy and cryptography:

• Multiple fixes and improvements to the decoy selection algorithm, with legacy multisig and empty outputs now handled correctly, further strengthening transaction privacy
• Introduced crypto::wipe following internal research, for more reliable clearing of sensitive data in memory

Predownload and build:

• Mainnet predownload files updated to height 3,709,300, covering both database engines including the unpruned versions. Testnet predownload updated to height 37,800
• Fixed the stacktrace build and added libstacktrace support for Android builds
• Fixed byte value output to avoid rare cases of terminal corruption

Wallet & RPC

• Fixed the current_pos_attempts calculation, needed for accurate PoS estimates, and adjusted constants so PoS estimates are calculated correctly on testnet as well
• Improved privacy by rounding the wallet's creation timestamp to weeks when making RPC calls, along with supporting refactoring
• Improved handling of rare non-coinbase unlock_time transactions
• Fixed a rare case where a confirmed transaction could be re-added from the pool as unconfirmed
• RPC: fixed a missing payment_id hex conversion in get_recent_txs_and_info2, now marked legacy
• RPC: allowed duplicate outputs_addresses in decrypt_tx_details

Web & Ecosystem

Zano Companion:

• The wallets overview now shows aliases instead of balances
• Message signing was reworked for stronger context. Companion now supports secure SIWX-style signatures and displays the requesting website's domain separately from the message, reducing potential misuse. The old message type still works but is now deprecated, with a move to secure-only signing planned
• All transaction confirmation popups, including transfers, Ionic swaps, and alias creation, now let users expand and inspect the full address before confirming
• The minimum password length was raised to 8 characters and the password encryption algorithm was updated. After the update, users will need to recreate their password and re-enter their wallet app token
• Removed obsolete methods such as BRIDGING_TRANSFER

Zano Trade:

• Improved the matching engine to better handle price and precision for extremely low amounts and values with many decimal places, reducing the risk of precision-related trading errors
• Implemented the new SIWX signatures on dev.trade.zano.org for developer testing, with a production rollout to follow across all ecosystem projects
• The dev DEX now requires bots to log in with a wallet signature every 24 hours instead of minting permanent JWTs, matching how regular users authenticate
• General security updates, including better rate limits and the removal of legacy, less secure endpoints

SDK (zano_web3):

• As part of the move to a more secure authentication flow, the new version no longer supports the useLocalStorage flag and no longer auto-generates a random signing message. Integrating apps must now supply their own secure message. This version is available as a canary release on npm, with one more major update planned for the React hook and web SDK before the stable release
• Improved atomic amount handling by moving away from unsafe JavaScript number handling for large atomic values
• Removed insecure console logs from production builds

Zano Matrix and Explorer:

• The Matrix address-check endpoint is now limited to 200 addresses per request
• The Explorer mobile UI structure was improved for accessibility, and sync was optimized to pull new blocks faster and eliminate the delay between the blockchain and the Explorer interface

Mobile

The biggest mobile effort this month was a full permission system for the in-app dApp browser (Zano Companion). Websites now go through a proper permission layer, with per-tab and per-dApp access requests, a new permissions settings screen, and a confirmation dialog before any dangerous action. Under the hood, the companion server now whitelists RPC methods and proxies core wallet methods instead of exposing them directly, while keeping backward compatibility for dApps that predate the permissions flow.

The app was migrated to the HF6 native lib and adopted the new subtransfers_by_pid wallet field ahead of activation. Other highlights:

• The shared amount input used across transfer, swap, burn, emit, and asset creation can now accept amounts entered in fiat currency, with converter fixes alongside
• Added validation to own-asset creation (full name, ticker, metadata), reworked the burn screen as a modal, and fixed the asset selector and asset details views
• Ionic swap proposals can now be shared or saved as a file, with native support on desktop, Android, and iOS
• Improved wallet lifecycle handling, with dedicated error screens for closed or missing wallets, busy-wallet flags in the file list, and action failures surfaced as toasts
• Added an in-app rating prompt on mobile, plus a manual rate button
• Renamed the app from Zano Mobile Wallet to Zano Wallet

On the native library side, the lib was moved to HF6, Boost was updated to version 1.84.0, full stacktrace support was wired up on Android via libbacktrace for better crash diagnostics, and the build gained a TESTNET flag for streamlined testnet builds.

Zano Fact #3: Did you know Zano offers both a GUI desktop wallet for everyday users and a CLI wallet for developers and power users? Same protocol, same privacy guarantees, two interfaces. Run the one that fits your workflow.

Zano Around the World

Zano Africa

June was a landmark month for the Zano African community. We successfully hosted the largest Zano gathering ever, welcoming over 700 attendees to the Zano Private Economy Conference in Zaria. Hundreds of new users experienced Zano for the first time through live wallet onboarding, merchant payment demonstrations, and privacy-focused education. The event also inspired local businesses to begin accepting ZANO, marking another step toward building a real Private Economy across Nigeria. This is just the beginning.

Zano Indonesia

Zano Indonesia distributed t-shirts to the community in Yogyakarta, a city that has become an education hub packed with students coming from all corners of the country. This boosted local engagement and brand awareness for Zano. Next up, Zano Indonesia is preparing to hit two major crypto conferences in Jakarta and Bali in August.

Zano Venezuela

In June, Zano Venezuela launched the Digital Sovereignty Operation powered by our Roraima ($RRMA) token. We successfully distributed over 2,000 tokens while educating the community about confidential assets. 🇻🇪

Zano India

We collaborated on a "Zano Introduction Video" with a regional KOL and the output was great. Currently, Zano India is running a "Zano India Telegram Invite Campaign" and has collaborated with various regional KOLs to amplify the announcement. A couple of small campaigns are also taking place inside Telegram to keep the community engaged and feel right at home!

Looking Ahead

With HF6 work finalized, July is about a smooth path to activation: helping users, exchanges, and service operators update ahead of block 3,833,000, and continuing to push the ecosystem tooling toward the new secure signing standard.

Gateway Addresses unlock a different kind of year for Zano: one where privacy stays default for people, while services can finally integrate without reinventing the stack. That is the trajectory this month locked in. Thank you for building it with us.

Cheers, zAnons!

Zano Links

Find everything Zano in one place.