Wasabi Wallet Breaks Bitcoin Privacy Barriers with 100-Person CoinJoin

Wasabi is an open-source, non-custodial light wallet that aims to protect users from information leaks. The wallet is comprised of a wide range of advanced features, designed to help users maintain their privacy and control when spending their bitcoins. This desktop-friendly Bitcoin wallet, which utilizes the anonymous Tor browser, is one the first mainstream light wallets to offer CoinJoin transactions — which dispatch a lot of transactions at once to obscure their sources.

Huge Congratulations – @wasabiwallet just did the first ever 100 person CoinJoin, likely the largest in Bitcoin History. https://t.co/kNkeHVBz28 A monumental achievement in Bitcoin privacy. Credit to the team @lontivero @molnardavid84 @nopara73 @dwuk86 @NicolasDorier and others!

— Aviv Milner (@milner_aviv) June 6, 2019

CoinJoin: The Answer to Bitcoin’s Privacy Issue?

First proposed by Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell in 2013, CoinJoin is one of the most prominent attempts to solve one of BTC’s greatest challenges: privacy. While addresses are pseudonymous, all transactions are publicly recorded on the blockchain — potentially undermining user privacy. Wasabi’s use of CoinJoin has largely made the bid for anonymity possible. The feature allows users to bundle their wallet balances together, effectively shuffling the coins to obscure the sender, the receiver, and the coins’ point-of-origin information. The Bitcoin wallet stands out by implementing a variation of the CoinJoin technology called “Chaumian Coinjoin,” which is, in short, defined as a trustless coin shuffling with mathematically-provable anonymity. This variation of the coin-mixing technology, dubbed Zerolink, was created by Wasabi founder Adam Ficsor.

The Largest-Ever CoinJoin

In its latest release, the Wasabi wallet has further upgraded its privacy features. Alongside user experience improvements, the update reduced bandwidth requirements 20-fold and increased loading speed by a factor of 12. These gradual improvements have now led to the largest CoinJoin to ever be recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain by Wasabi Wallet. The 100-person CoinJoin is considered to be a great step forward in terms of privacy for Bitcoin’s network. As the largest and most-capitalized network, Bitcoin has been marred by blockchain analysis software that is able to trace transactions and conduct statistical inference analysis on its users. By achieving such a large CoinJoin, Wasabi Wallet enables users to stay out of range of blockchain tracing attempts. Will this make Bitcoin transactions private? Can wallets like Wasabi Wallet make privacy-centered coins obsolete? Share your opinion in the comments!

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