In the wake of US lawsuits against the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the company zkSNACKs has announced the end of the coinjoin service on the Bitcoin wallet Wasabi Wallet. This feature facilitated the anonymization of BTC.
Wasabi Wallet announces the end of its coinjoin service
In recent weeks, the US crusade against the cryptocurrency ecosystem has redoubled in intensity. Among the targets of these attacks are Bitcoin wallets (BTC), as evidenced by the Samourai Wallet case, whose co-founders are accused of money laundering. It’s against this backdrop that zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi Wallet, has announced the end of its coinjoin service as of June 1 :
After years of relentless dedication to improve Bitcoin’s privacy, zkSNACKs, the company pioneering the development of Wasabi Wallet, is shutting down its coinjoin coordination service, effective June 1st, 2024.
Blog post announcement link:https://t.co/zMxvQJuQFZ
– Wasabi Wallet (@wasabiwallet) May 2, 2024
For a very succinct explanation, a coinjoin service allows incoming BTC from various transactions to be mixed together before being sent back to their recipient, in such a way that it becomes more difficult to trace them back to their origin.
Thus, Wasabi Wallet will continue to function as a Bitcoin wallet, still giving the possibility to create and use new addresses, however, its anonymization features will be considerably reduced:
Even without coinjoin, Wasabi’s client-side filtering architecture, Tor integration and custom coin selection make it the most private lightweight wallet available. However, the nature of the Bitcoin blockchain prevents users from achieving complete privacy without coinjoin.
Faced with this announcement, members of the community expressed their sadness, also including Edward Snowden, who wondered about the possibility of using a decentralized coordinator in order to keep the coinjoin service going:
This is genuinely sad. Surely the project can shim in a (decentralized?) replacement coordinator or something before pulling the plug, no? Or “insert coordination configuration here” field? Certainly no less (theoretical) liability than already incurred under the DOJ’s willfully…
– Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 2, 2024
Undoubtedly, zkSNACKs’ decision is designed to protect itself from retaliation by the United States.
At the same time, BTC has risen by 3.5% in 24 hours, to a price of $59,500.
