Zano Monthly Project Update #22 - July 2026

GinoFPM

• 12 min read
Zano Monthly Project Update #22 - July 2026

Welcome zAnons to the 22nd Zano Project Update!

July was a heavy engineering month with one large announcement on top of it. Zenith, the design for Zano's move to pure proof of stake, was published after years of research and collaboration with Common Prefix. Days earlier, the Zano Forum opened, with sign-in tied to your on-chain alias rather than a username anyone can copy. Underneath both, Hard Fork 6 hardening continued across consensus, cryptography, and the wallet. Let's dive in!

Table of contents

Hard Fork 6: On Track for August

HF6 activates at block 3,833,000, expected between August 25 and 27, 2026, and the updated wallet has been live since June. Running a node, pool, exchange, or other service? Make sure you update your wallet before the hardfork activation. Everyone else needs a current wallet, nothing more.

Most of July's core work went into hardening the consensus rules and gateway infrastructure the fork introduces.

Integrating a UTXO-based privacy chain has always been the hard part of listing Zano: wallet sync logic, coin selection, custom signing, and a resync after every downtime. After HF6, a service registers a Gateway Address and reads one account balance. Registration is permissionless, so any exchange or bridge can set one up without asking anyone.

Full details, including a live activation timer, are in The Countdown to Hard Fork 6 Has Begun. Services should work through the HF6 migration guide this month.

Zano Fact: Did you know registering a Gateway Address costs 100 $ZANO, and that fee is burned? Every service that plugs into Zano removes coins from supply on the way in.

The Road After HF6: The Execution Layer and Zenith

Halfway through July, two publications set out where Zano goes after the fork.

The roadmap was updated on July 17, and its key addition is the Zano Execution Layer: an EVM sidechain that brings smart contracts to the ecosystem while Zano L1 remains the privacy chain. Standard Solidity contracts and tooling run unmodified: Hardhat, Foundry, MetaMask, and audited contract libraries all work from day one, with bridged $ZANO as the native gas coin. That opens the door to lending markets, AMMs and yield for $ZANO and Confidential Assets like $fUSD inside the ecosystem, with $ZANO used as gas in every transaction. The team has worked on infrastructure and node preparation, in anticipation of the public testnet estimated for Q3 2026, with mainnet targeted for Q4 2026.

On July 16th, we published Zenith, the design for Zano's move from hybrid PoW/PoS to pure Proof of Stake, developed in collaboration with Common Prefix based on Zarcanum's privacy foundations. Consensus decides who adds the next block and when a transaction can be treated as settled.

Zenith did not begin as a plan to remove proof of work. The research started as another attempt to improve the existing hybrid consensus, kept hitting structural limits inherited from the PoW side, and ended with the team changing the question instead of the answer. It produced two protocols, StakeNote and Zenith; Zano chose Zenith because it extends the private staking machinery already on the network.

Users will notice speed first. Block time drops from about a minute to roughly 15 seconds, recommended block confirmations fall from 10 blocks to 4 to 6, and a typical confirmation lands in 60 to 90 seconds. Those parameters still have to survive implementation testing and network-level validation. Design is finished, implementation is not: testnet is estimated for Q4 2026, mainnet for Q2 2027. The Zenith whitepaper has the formal treatment.

The Zano Forum Is Live

Announced in June, opened in July: forum.zano.org is now the primary place for discussion and support, replacing Discord, and it ships with the feature that motivated the move: sign in with your Zano alias.

Impersonation is why that matters. A username can be copied in seconds, and fake support agents are the most common way people here lose funds. An on-chain alias cannot be duplicated, so a badge is proof rather than a claim.

Categories cover Announcements, General Discussions, Need Help, Content, Community Feedback, Projects on Zano and Development, the last being home to protocol internals, APIs and tooling. Threads for the roadmap and Zenith are open now.

One reminder that keeps saving people money: the team will never DM you first, and wallet support is never provided through Telegram or Discord. For official help, use the forum or https://zano.org/support.

Zano Spotlight: ZanoX

ZanoX is a non-custodial platform on Zano that brings prediction markets and sports forecasting into a private environment, covering live sport as well as crypto, politics, economics, technology and culture. Users connect their own wallet rather than depositing funds, so ZanoX never holds a balance: predictions and winnings settle on-chain, and confidential transactions keep the activity private. To learn more about the ZanoX team and their vision, we asked them some questions: 

With so many blockchains available, why did you choose to build on Zano?

There are innumerable reasons why we love Zano, not the least of which is the security-centric nature. Likewise, the community is fantastic. Being around a group of like-minded individuals working towards a common goal is an incredible experience, and I'm blessed and thankful to be part of the zAnon family. I thoroughly enjoy being put in a position where I can ensure not just my privacy, but the privacy of my brothers as well.

What problem does your project solve, and what makes your approach different from existing alternatives?

So our project solves the ongoing and ever-present conflict between good, law-abiding people and big brother. There's an extensive move in present government for surveillance overreach and invasive technologies that none of us signed up for when we were born into this financial system. Our job is to win the technological Cold War here, and to ensure that our transactions, our bets, our predictions, and what we spend, when and where and how we spend it, is our business.

What can the Zano community expect from your project over the next 6 to 12 months?

In the next 6 to 12 months, we intend to expand our offerings from the sportsbook. We're going to incorporate parlays and potentially live betting, and on the prediction markets side we plan to include weather markets and integrate mirror trading with Kalshi. With the lottery, we plan to have daily, weekly, and monthly draws. On the development side, we're expecting slots to land in the coming weeks.

You can also find ZanoX inside the Bitcoin.com Wallet, with positions settling in $ZANO or $fUSD. Take a look at zanox.io.

Ecosystem Growth and Integrations

Growth in July was steady. Total burned $ZANO reached 13,904 against 13,217, up about 5%, and confirmed transactions came to 121,028, up roughly 3.5%. Average transactions per block edged down from 2.73 to 2.71. Aliases grew by 108 to 15,444 and Confidential Assets by two to 922. Total value locked made the clearest move, from $24.90M to $26.99M, up about 8.4%.

Zano Fact: Did you know Zano payments are irreversible by design? Merchants who accept $ZANO carry no chargeback risk, which is part of why point-of-sale integrations keep appearing.

Events

Spending was the theme. On July 15th, we launched a cashback campaign with AEON Pay: spend $ZANO or $fUSD at any of the 50M+ AEON Pay merchants and top spenders share a $500 prize pool, with $150 for first, $100 for second, $75 for third and $25 each for fourth through tenth. It runs to September 1st. Check the eligibility notes first: no VPN during top-up, a 0.8% top-up fee, no KYC under $200.

A day later, Zano hosted a joint X Space with the AEON Community on spending privately at real merchants, joined by Lil__Kingg on using AEON Pay day-to-day in Nigeria. A $100 reward pool went to 20 winners.

Two team changes were announced on July 20th: Gino (@GinoFPM) steps in as Community Manager, and Gonzalo (@Gonbat03) moves into Quality Assurance (QA), the work he wants to focus on.

Technical Upgrades

Engineering effort had two centers of gravity: making HF6's rules enforceable at consensus rather than only in the wallet, and rebuilding the decoy selection algorithm that decides what your transaction hides among.

Core, Protocol & Consensus

Rules only the wallet enforces are not really rules. Much of this cluster moves HF6's gateway and asset limits into consensus, where every node checks them.

  • Gateway descriptor limits (meta_info size, empty checks) and asset ticker, full name, and meta_info limits are enforced at consensus level from HF6
  • validate_tx_semantic added to the alternative-block transaction validation path, and a check in check_tx_input() hardened (security hardening)
  • Fixed an HF6-specific issue in generate_asset_surjection_proof_hf6() when a gateway output precedes a ZC one
  • Fixed a rare incorrect unwind order in purge_transaction_from_blockchain() (gateway and HF6 specific)
  • Tx pool: fixed the asset operation validation base height (precautionary), and change_gateway_balance now skips redundant database writes when the balance is unchanged
  • Added Zano extension ID validation in HTTP origin, made verify_BGE_proof() noexcept (cryptography hardening), and raised the minimum recommended OpenSSL to 3.5.7 LTS
  • P2P: implemented a sync speed calculator
  • Serialization: fixed a missing vout key and separators in object_in_json

Node operators get an official Zano Docker image too, at zano.org/docker, with several Dockerfile improvements this month.

Wallet & RPC

Every Zano transaction hides among decoys pulled from the chain's history, and how they are chosen determines how well it hides. That algorithm was the month's largest wallet change.

  • Major improvements to the decoy selection algorithm: fixed getrandomouts4, removed 2x height sampling, bound HF4 distributions to max_h, fixed stake output maturity, further improving transaction uniformity ahead of HF6
  • get_payments and get_bulk_payments are now assets-aware, and the deprecated push_payer and hide_receiver options were completely eliminated from the wallet RPC
  • decrypt_data hardened to check the return value of wallet2::decrypt_buffer
  • Fixed request checks in get_blocks_direct and get_blocks, plus a minor fix in getblockhash
  • GUI: fixed an incorrect (empty) resulting transaction in wallets_manager::transfer()
  • simplewallet: check_all_tx_keys output, transaction secret keys and seed doctor data now print to console only, never to logs; a crash when running without command-line options is fixed (#712)
  • Gateway tools: client-side decryption of gateway address history via a local proxy

Web & Ecosystem

SDKs are how a website talks to your wallet, so anything loosely specified in one becomes a security problem later. July finished the typing work on zano_web3/web.

SDK (zano_web3):

  • All available Zano Companion methods are now covered by the zano_web3/web SDK with properly typed inputs and outputs, so developers see the exact response structure the daemon returns
  • Previously missing web extension methods added: REQUEST_MESSAGE_SIGN, IONIC_SWAP, IONIC_SWAP_ACCEPT, GET_PERMISSIONS, GET_WALLET_BALANCE, TRANSFER, GET_IONIC_SWAP_PROPOSAL_INFO, GET_WHITELIST, ADD_WHITELIST_ASSET and BURN_ASSET
  • Moving toward more secure dApp connections, zano_web3/web no longer includes a React hook or an all-in-one wallet connection method
  • The new version, with SIWX-style authorization, is rolled out across Zano Matrix, Zano Wrapped and Zano Trade

Zano Companion:

  • Tracking and auditable wallets are now supported: tracking wallets are limited to read-only requests from dApps, auditable wallets behave like regular ones
Auditable Wallet on the left, Tracking Wallet on the right — selective transparency when needed, without giving up privacy by default.
  • dApp request confirmations are wallet-bound, so the selected wallet cannot change once the popup appears, making behaviour more predictable across multiple Companion instances
  • The wallet alias, when available, now shows in the Companion header instead of the address
  • A startup bug that picked the wrong wallet after reordering in the Zano App is fixed

Zano Trade:

  • The neverExpires flag for bots is no longer supported and will be removed completely on August 15. Bots will need a new access token every 24 hours

Mobile

Version 3.3.0 shipped in July, closing the release cycle that carried the dApp browser permission system, the reworked burn screen, own-asset creation validation, and wallet lifecycle improvements.

  • Adopted the new subtransfers_by_pid wallet field and wired up subtransfers support ahead of HF6
  • The "wallets are busy" dialog now appears before the wallet selector, so it is clear why a wallet cannot be opened
  • Desktop builds: fixed the Linux build, the Ubuntu 22.04 build and the desktop display name
  • Android CI/CD: added the backtrace library for crash diagnostics, switched to the Zano build with ethhash, updated zano_native_lib
  • Build plumbing: bundle and CI identifiers renamed ahead of the Lite wallet release
Zano Fact: Did you know four times as many blocks under Zenith will not mean four times the chain? An epoch spans about 10 minutes and holds 40 blocks, and once it finalizes, most are pruned to a compact skeleton.

Media Content & Coverage

Our explainer series kept running on the Zano YouTube channel: an episode on why financial privacy matters, one on fungibility, and one that explains how Zano keeps every transaction private by default. This is just the start of a longer explainer video series with a new one posted every Thursday around 5 pm CET.

Zano Around the World

Zano’s global community kept growing in July, with regional teams driving education, events, campaigns, and onboarding across the world. Here’s a look at what happened in each region.

Zano Africa

Nigeria opened a partnership with Amplify Africa, a community of crypto users across Eastern Africa focused on financial privacy and onboarding new Zano users. The two ran a joint X Space AMA on the Private Economy, alongside the regular Zano Africa Community Quiz and continued community-led education. August brings more Spaces, more quizzes, and Zano & Friends meetups every weekend.

Zano France

French Telegram doubled in size during the second half of the month, with new members welcomed throughout. Translated news went out alongside educational content making Zano's technology and privacy features easier to understand, on both Telegram and X. The ZANO Flash Quiz returns in August with rewards for the members who know the project best, and more educational material is planned before HF6.

Zano Spain and Latin America

Spain and Latin America run a $30 monthly bounty for the most active user across their social channels, and this month's zAnon has been announced. Telegram is the focus and it is working: 184 messages in Zano - Español, covering privacy news, security and Zano updates. Content included AEON Pay user guides, the AEON Pay x Zano campaign, and analysis of how Zenith and $fUSD position Zano. Growth is slow but steady.

Zano Indonesia

Telegram has grown to 331 members with 19,535 messages recorded in total, and the regional X account had its strongest month yet: 5.3K impressions, up 35% month over month, at a 6.7% engagement rate. Engagements nearly doubled to 359: 33 replies, 179 likes, 88 reposts and 29 bookmarks. Verified followers stand at 23 of a target pool of 125. August takes the team to crypto events in Jakarta and Bali.

Zano Venezuela

Roraima returned as a three-week promotional raffle built on auditable Zano wallets, with a token-burn mechanic to drive activity. It distributed 180 $fUSD through reward pools and produced 8 new alias registrations during onboarding workshops. Spanish-language explainers covered zero-knowledge mechanics, auditable wallets and the privacy ecosystem, and the team produced copy and media assets for the ZanoX forecasting interface. Finalizing distributions comes next.

Zano India

An invite campaign brought in 516 new community members, amplified by six regional KOLs: four on X and two Telegram channel owners. Daily Telegram activity rewards ran across seven days with seven winners. Four #PrivacyTuesday X Spaces went out, each closing with a quiz round and a $20 $ZANO giveaway, and the team traveled to Jaipur to represent $ZANO at the BitMela community meetup.

Zano Brasil

Brazil started from nothing in July. Launching the @zanobrasil account came with a 15-day technical education campaign on stealth addresses, ring signatures and confidential transactions, set against the surveillance built into Pix and DREX. Fifteen or more threads and posts brought in 800 impressions and 60 followers, a foundation rather than a result. Phase 2 targets 120 followers and a local Telegram campaign.

Looking Ahead

August is the month the fork lands. Block 3,833,000 arrives between August 25 and 27, and for most readers the only thing between them and a smooth activation is an updated wallet. Node operators, pools, exchanges, and services have more to do, starting with the migration guide. If you run a bot on Zano Trade, neverExpires disappears on August 15.

Past the fork, work continues toward the Execution Layer public testnet, estimated for Q3 2026, while the ecosystem keeps moving to the new secure signing standard. In September, the team heads to Common S3nse, a cypherpunk crypto event in Amsterdam on the 4th and 5th.

Three things happened in July that point the same way. Zenith set the destination for consensus, the Execution Layer set it for smart contracts, and HF6 opens the door for everyone else to integrate without rebuilding around a privacy chain. Come find us on the forum, and see you on the other side.

Cheers, zAnons!

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