Confidential Assets — Private Tokens on Zano

Issue private stablecoins, utility tokens, or other assets on the Zano chain. Same privacy guarantees as ZANO itself.

Tokens on most chains are public by default.

Issuing a token on Ethereum or any transparent chain means every transaction is publicly visible — the sender, the receiver, the amount, the token type. Even chains marketed as private often have privacy only on the base coin layer, with tokens running on a separate transparent system. The result: users who hold private base-coin balances must give up privacy the moment they hold a token.

How Confidential Assets work

Zano's Confidential Assets specification extends the chain's native privacy primitives to tokens. The same cryptographic machinery that hides amounts and addresses for ZANO transactions also hides them for Confidential Asset transactions. Critically, the asset type itself is hidden — an external observer cannot tell whether a given transaction is moving ZANO, fUSD, or another Confidential Asset. Every Confidential Asset transaction looks like every other Zano transaction.

This is a different model from "private mode" tokens (which hide some details but reveal others) or wrapped-private tokens (which use a centralized custodian to hold the underlying asset). Confidential Assets are native — issued directly on Zano with the chain's full privacy semantics from genesis.

Hidden amounts

Transfer values are concealed at the protocol layer, just like native ZANO.

Hidden asset types

Observers can't tell which asset moved — only that a transaction happened.

Native to the chain

Not a smart-contract layer on top — issued at the Zano protocol level itself.

fUSD and beyond

fUSD is a live private stablecoin built on Confidential Assets. The same primitive supports brand tokens and private NFTs.

Honest tradeoffs

Liquidity for non-ZANO Confidential Assets depends on the asset's adoption. fUSD has some liquidity; less-adopted Confidential Assets may have thin secondary markets.

Issuer trust matters for stablecoins. A private stablecoin's value depends on the issuer's backing model. The chain provides privacy; it does not guarantee solvency.

Wallet support varies. Most wallets on the Zano chain (including Zano Wallet) support Confidential Assets, but the ecosystem of tools is smaller than for transparent-chain tokens.

Examples

fUSD is a private stablecoin issued as a Confidential Asset. It targets dollar parity and transacts with full Zano privacy. Use cases include stablecoin holding without exposing balance, private cross-border value transfer, and privacy-preserving DeFi-like activity.
Other Confidential Assets can be issued by anyone (subject to protocol-level constraints). Issuance is a one-time on-chain action.