What is Zano?

The word "Zano" is shared by several unrelated things. This page is about Zano the cryptocurrency / blockchain — not the failed 2014–2015 Kickstarter drone, not Nick Zano the actor, not Zano lighting fixtures, and not the hardware wallet sold by ZAHN HOLDING in Liechtenstein. The Zano cryptocurrency is a separate project from all of those.

If you're researching the cryptocurrency, you're in the right place.

Zano is an open-source Layer 1 cryptocurrency. "Layer 1" means it has its own blockchain — not a token built on top of Ethereum or Solana. It launched in May 2019 with mainnet release. Before Zano, the same development team built Boolberry (2014); Boolberry holders swapped 1:1 to Zano at mainnet launch.

Native coin: ZANO. Total supply: approximately 15.27–15.3 million coins. Every transaction hides who sent it, who received it, how much was sent, and — since the 2024 Zarcanum hard fork — what type of asset was sent. These guarantees are enforced by the protocol on every transaction. There is no "private mode" toggle.

Zano descends from the CryptoNote protocol — the original privacy-coin design that Monero, Bytecoin, MobileCoin, and others also fork from. The CryptoNote reference implementation was authored by Andrey Sabelnikov, who also leads Zano's development. The protocol family Monero forked has been continuously developed inside the Zano project specifically by people who built it the first time.

That heritage matters because privacy cryptography is unforgiving — bugs in privacy primitives can silently compromise users for years before discovery. CryptoNote-derived chains have been studied, audited, and stress-tested by adversaries. New "privacy" chains starting from scratch don't have that maturity.

Zano alternates Proof-of-Work blocks (ProgPoWZ algorithm, GPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant) and Proof-of-Stake blocks (Zarcanum, the first hidden-amount PoS scheme). Reorganizing the chain at depth requires capturing both hashpower and stake — neither alone suffices.

Since the Zarcanum hard fork (March 2024), anyone can issue tokens on the Zano chain that inherit its full privacy guarantees: hidden amounts, hidden addresses, hidden asset types. fUSD is a live private stablecoin built on this primitive.

Zano Wallet is an independent third-party desktop application for the Zano blockchain — built and maintained by Zano Wallet LLC, not by the Zano Foundation. It is open source, non-custodial, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. No signup, no email, no ID.