As software, Bitcoin is programmable, and its transactions can be made collaborative to protect users from leaking sensitive transaction details. Coinjoins are bulk bitcoin transactions that do just that. Coinjoin allows users to prevent personal information leaks on the public Bitcoin network, reclaiming their privacy. Users can protect their transaction history while retaining the ability to choose who to share confidential financial information with.

Coinjoin for Everyone, Anywhere

For a long time, coinjoin protocols have been difficult to develop and implementations have been difficult to deploy and maintain, with many performance, reliability and efficiency quirks. 

Now, with a simple Coinjoin API recently announced, collaborative bitcoin transactions are accessible to anyone, including companies that want to add powerful and robust privacy features to their bitcoin products, such as wallets, brokers, custodians and more. Over the past five years, Wasabi Wallet has shown that coinjoins can bring privacy to a large number of consumers without any tradeoffs on security or sovereignty. With an ever-growing interest in recording and analyzing public bitcoin transactions, bitcoin companies must now find new ways to protect the privacy of their customers as they move to a Bitcoin standard. The Coinjoin API makes this available to the enterprise market and increases the value proposition for Bitcoin itself. 

“Anonymity loves company, and that’s why we love that anyone can use our Coinjoin API to join the privacy party of our existing users. WabiSabi is efficient, fast, and flexible, where alternative clients can pioneer cutting-edge features. BTCPayServer users can efficiently batch multiple payments in a single coinjoin, and Trezor Suite users are the first to enjoy hardware wallet security of their private keys in coinjoins. This freedom to innovate on the edges will let a thousand flowers bloom” – Max Hillebrand, CEO at zkSNACKs and Wasabi Wallet contributor. 

With over a million devices sold, Trezor, one of the world’s most popular bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturers, has already integrated the Coinjoin API developed by zkSNACKs earlier in 2023. 

“Our mission is strengthening the power and independence of the individual. Coinjoin is an essential piece in the privacy puzzle and we try to make it as simple as possible. Now anyone can reclaim their privacy without compromise on security.” – Hynek Jína, Head of Development at Trezor

As a self-hosted bitcoin payment processor, BTCPay Server has integrated the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol into a plug-in, making this feature available to all of its merchants, who can now even run their own coinjoin coordinator infrastructure. 

“BTCPay Server has always championed privacy-centric solutions. When the WabiSabi protocol became production-ready, it was a no-brainer for me to build an option to incorporate it. The flexibility of WabiSabi is astounding, allowing me to innovate by using a privacy solution as a scaling solution. Now, merchants can schedule and batch their bitcoin payments to be broadcast through coinjoins, hitting two birds with one stone. BTCPay Server even allows you to effortlessly integrate WabiSabi coinjoins into your operations through its extensive API. And with the upcoming payment protocol, a service provider will be able to offer the most private financial settlement experience possible to its customers, at no extra cost.” – Kukks, BTCPayServer

In the early Wasabi Wallet 1.0 version, Cyphernode and Chaincase had already successfully integrated the API to build clients with new functionalities such as multi-wallet management for the former and deploying on the iOS platform for the latter. Even with these early innovations, we’re still at the beginning of scaling accessible Bitcoin privacy to millions of users, and the Coinjoin API is a new product to help bitcoin businesses on that path forward. As new partners integrate with the zkSNACKs Coinjoin API, liquidity improves, which provides better service to all existing users. In other words, coinjoins are social and benefit from network effects to improve the level of privacy for all users with an optimal level of speed, cost and ease of use. 

Existing bitcoin companies can leverage new opportunities to monetize a high-traffic wallet or broker through an affiliate program with revenue sharing. Offering an additional feature to existing users creates new income diversifying revenue streams, while potentially attracting new users by providing state-of-the-art Bitcoin privacy features. With regular user data breaches targeting bitcoin exchanges, brokers and lenders, companies can now mitigate the impact on their customers by preventing address clustering and transaction tracking. Companies can also fully comply with local and regional consumer privacy laws by protecting users’ personally identifiable information, preventing non-consensual sharing of user data on the public Bitcoin network. 

If you are a Bitcoin company interested in joining the affiliate program and learning more about the Coinjoin API, please contact zkSNACKs at [email protected]. 

The post Announcing Private Bitcoin for Enterprises with a New Coinjoin API appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Particularly, it gives you a perspective on how Wasabi wallet enables coinjoins without gaining access to your bitcoin or collecting and revealing your private financial data.

The “zk” stands for Zero-Knowledge. zkSNACKs is a pun originating from the cryptographic techniques zk-SNARKS (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) and zk-STARKS (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Transparent Argument of Knowledge).

In simplistic terms, zero knowledge refers to cryptographic methods that allow sharing of secrets between two parties without ever revealing the secret.  

Zero-knowledge is the base on which the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol runs. This article highlights the following:

1. How zero knowledge works

2. Other ways Wasabi Wallet implements zero knowledge

3. Why Wasabi and the future of technology rely on zero knowledge

Problem: What To Know vs What Not To Know

The goal of a coinjoin is to achieve privacy. That said, a coinjoin would defeat its practical application if it divulges information about the user to anyone, even to the coordinator.

Yet for the coinjoin transaction to happen, the coordinator would have to:

1. Know the users’ input amounts and addresses from the inbound transactions

2. Know the amount and output addresses to map the coinjoined bitcoin

3. Access the network information of user wallets connecting to the coordinator

But even with the challenges posed, Wasabi Wallet always enables coinjoins while remaining blind to your private transaction details.

So how does the wallet achieve this?

The Magic Behind Zero Knowledge Proofs

The idea behind zero-knowledge proofs is that you don’t have to reveal something if you can prove that you know something. And in the context of the zkSNACKs coordinator, you don’t have to pass your private information if you have proof that the information you’re sending to the coordinator is true.

Wasabi Wallet implements cryptographic proofs to allow you to prove your transactional details such as the amount and output addresses, so you never disclose your information to the zkSNACKs coordinator.

Having these zero-knowledge proofs also means that you never have to send/trust the zkSNACKS coordinator with your bitcoin to coinjoin. In the background, wallets send proofs which are verified by the coordinator to allow your bitcoin to be included in the jointly spent transaction.

Zero Knowledge Doesn’t Stop With Coinjoins, Your Network Privacy Matters

If privacy-enhancing measures ended at the blockchain level, then Wasabi Wallet would still leak your network information and reveal your IP address or location.

This flaw happens to be the chink in the armor for many bitcoin wallets when they access and broadcast transactions over unshielded Internet connections. Transmitting to other peers over the Internet gives away your network information and as a result, your wallet becomes easy to fingerprint for surveillance.

Similarly, connecting to the coordinator for coinjoins over the Internet would reveal your network information. To circumnavigate this privacy flaw, Wasabi Wallet integrates Tor to uphold its zero-knowledge policy.

Tor achieves privacy by passing communications over multiple hops, separating your identity from its original source. Each hop contains no information about the starting or ending point, it only provides information about the next hop on the route. Or put simply, Tor cloaks the communication by adding layers (Onion Layers) on top of your Internet connection when connecting to Wasabi Wallet.

How Tor Is Used To Preserve Zero Knowledge

1. Using Tor during the registration of inputs and outputs to the coordinator

When the inputs and outputs are registered for a coinjoin through one connection, they become linked. The link will tell the coordinator the network identity of the user associated with the inputs and outputs. By using different Tor connections for inputs and outputs, there is no single network identity that is revealed to the coordinator.

Zero-knowledge between inputs and outputs is necessary for the coinjoin to gain any privacy. Wasabi takes this a step further by also using a new Tor identity for registering each individual input or output. For example, since up to 10 inputs and 8 outputs can be registered by a single client in a single round, this uses 18 unique Tor addresses to prevent any two addresses from being matched.

2. Using Tor when making queries to the public ledger

When Wasabi Wallet is querying ledger data from peers, it downloads one block per Tor identity so that peers do not become aware the same user received transactions in multiple blocks. To further prevent linking or building associations with specific peers, queries are made to random peers while including random data that does not necessarily relate to your query.

“False positive” blocks downloaded by your wallet prevent spies from “narrowing down” any transactions recorded by you on the blockchain since the data you download may include blocks you are not interested in at all.

Conveniently, Tor found a perfect use case in Wasabi Wallet. Without it, all your transaction information would remain tied to your network identity, negating the purpose of participating in a coinjoin.

Beyond Zero Knowledge in Wasabi Wallet

What is extraordinary about the application of zero knowledge in Wasabi Wallet is that it effectively adds a thick layer of privacy on top of bitcoin while still remaining a bitcoin wallet.

Ironically, the most groundbreaking applications of zero-knowledge are best suited, and even much more needed outside the realm of bitcoin. In particular, Internet applications collect more data than they could ever use. The application of zero-knowledge would mean that users can use applications without revealing data they would prefer not to share.

Some interesting ways zero knowledge improves applications include;

1.  Creation of digital identities without giving away personal details such as date of birth or phone numbers by using a public/private key pair, such as Nostr.

2.  Data privacy: zero-knowledge could allow you to complete a credit card payment without revealing your credit card number or personal information.

3.  Secure data sharing: data could be shared between two parties without revealing more information about the data itself. For example, drug companies could reveal that their drugs are effective on various test models without revealing the structure of the drug’s proprietary compounds.

Using zero-knowledge software reduces the amount of data collected by companies and therefore, reduces attack vectors in case of a cyber breach. Additionally, the future application of zero-knowledge is what will save Internet privacy from its potential demise.

Wasabi Wallet ensures users achieve zero knowledge for the maximum level of financial privacy without needing extra tools.

Download Wasabi Wallet.

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First of all, why do we even work on Bitcoin? Well, because money is an incredibly important good for a prosperous society to function. When you hold money, every entrepreneur in your economy will happily solve any problem you might have. Saving your capital in money helps you sleep better at night, knowing that tomorrow you can buy everything you might need.

But, there is good money and there is bad money. If anyone forces you to use a specific money, then generally speaking it’s a bad one. Free people will choose a money that they deem good. Bitcoin is a common choice because it has a predefined and unchanging money supply, so nobody can print himself money and hand it out to friends. Cryptography protects the ownership of coins, which makes theft pretty difficult.

Bitcoin has sound economic principles and powerful cryptographic protocols with an unrestricted free market for anyone to start getting paid in bitcoin. Economically and technically speaking, bitcoin is unstoppable and will eventually be used by the overwhelming majority of all merchants.

However, there are other important aspects of good money, which currently Bitcoin is not optimally designed for. Specifically, the fungibility of money; that any coin has the same demand as any other coin. Merchants don’t care which specific coin they get paid in, as long as it is valid. But in bitcoin, a coin has a unique transaction history which is publicly known and verified by every node. This transaction history makes each coin a unique and non-fungible unit.

In the worst case, this open transaction history is the basis for a dystopian surveillance system. Where every transaction of the same person is clustered together and tied to his identity. Now, everyone is spying on everyone else and the choice of what to reveal about yourself to the world is taken from everyone.

It might be inevitable that bitcoin succeeds economically. But a future where people are in control of whom to tell about their sensitive financial transactions is still uncertain.

But not all hope is lost. There are so many tricks and strategies to increase the financial privacy of bitcoin users. The best thing is, most of them don’t even require any changes to the bitcoin consensus rules but can already be used today. Tor, block filter synchronization, coinjoin, coin swaps, lightning network and eCash; there are endless ways of improving the privacy, security and usability of everyday bitcoiners.

This is the reasoning for why we work on bitcoin privacy and why we focus on innovating at the edges with Wasabi, the privacy-focused bitcoin wallet.

The post Why We Work on Bitcoin Privacy appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Wasabi Wallet 1.0 solved a lot of difficult problems out of the box. Tor was natively integrated, protecting user IP addresses. Block filters were used to synchronize wallets without anyone else learning about the transaction history. The best available zerolink coinjoin protocol with Chaumian blind signatures provided privacy on the blockchain.

However, the Chaumian blind signature protocol had limitations that lead to a bad user experience and excessive blockspace usage. The minimum denomination was too large for many users, denying them access to the service. But for others it was too small, resulting in many coins in the wallet, which is expensive. If a user wanted to consolidate many inputs in the same coinjoin transaction, he had to tell the coordinator which belonged together. Even though the coordinator could not link the inputs of one user to the equal amount output he received, it was public knowledge which non-equal change output the user received.

Some of these concerns were improved with marginal upgrades to the protocol during the Wasabi 1.0 life cycle. However, in order to truly solve these issues, a fundamental solution was required. But at this point, we did not know what technology existed that could be applied at scale.

A group of developers, cryptographers and enthusiasts got together in the Wasabi Research Club, a weekly meeting to define, discuss and solve this complex problem. Initially, a different academic paper was chosen as the topic for each week. We invited the authors of each paper to join us, and many did, giving ample opportunity to ask questions. One of the researchers, usually Aviv Milner, started the call with a short presentation to introduce and summarize the paper. The recordings of these calls are available on the Wasabi Wallet YouTube channel.

A breakthrough moment was when Jonas Nick suggested that keyed verified anonymous credentials might be a great fit for our specific use case. There are numerous different cryptographic schemes in this category, like Brands’ credentials, Mercurial signatures, anonymous credentials light and keyed verified anonymous credentials. The specific paper Jonas brought to our attention was The Signal Private Group System and Anonymous Credentials Supporting Efficient Verifiable Encryption, written by Melissa Chase, Trevor Perrin and Greg Zaverucha.

This cryptography allows a central server to issue tokens which can have many attributes. Each of these attributes can be blindly committed to, then selectively revealed at a later point. These tokens can be transferred anonymously. The trick we use in WabiSabi specifically, is that one attribute of these credentials is a blinded value of sats. Pedersen commitments are used so that the coordinator never learns how many sats one token has attributed, but he can still ensure that nobody is creating more money than he spent.

These anonymous digital bearer certificates are the access rights to the new bitcoin transaction that is being built. The coordinator issues tokens and gives it to anyone who provides an input. And later, any anonymous user who provides such a token, can write an output address and amount to the transaction. These tokens ensure nobody is writing more outputs than inputs, without the users having to sacrifice their privacy to the central server.

At this point, we had a pretty solid idea of the problem and how flexible anonymous eCash tokens can be used to solve it. This was a sufficient advancement to document in a new paper, WabiSabi: Centrally Coordinated CoinJoins with Variable Amounts, which was peer reviewed and published. This paper was finalized mainly by Adam Ficsor, Yuval Kogman, Lucas Ontivero and István András Seres.

A crucial next step was to implement the cryptography that makes the system possible. Lucas Ontivero, Yuval Kogman and David Molnar dedicated months to building, testing and reviewing this critical part of the codebase. An independent security firm was hired to audit the code base and several outside contributors have reviewed it as well. In the following months, Wasabi’s client and server code were upgraded and sometimes entirely rewritten to support this new protocol.

With the protocol designed, the cryptography implemented and the client and server code well on its way, we realized that some of the most difficult questions are still unanswered. Now that the coordinator no longer dictates the minimum value of inputs and what output values to register, what exactly should the client do now? With great power, comes great responsibility. For the first time in the history of bitcoin coinjoin, the client can basically do whatever it wants. This turned out to be rather uncharted territory, with conflicting ideas of how to approach the subject.

Anonymity likes company meaning that it’s a good idea to hide in a crowd. So a coinjoin transaction should have many coins with the exact same amount of sats. However, every transaction should have many different equal amounts. One of Yuval’s many insights was to use low Hamming weight standard denominations. Only a few of these amounts are required to sum up to any arbitrary value. Specifically, these standard denominations are powers of two, powers of three, and 1, 2, and 5 times the powers of ten. Between 5000 sats and 1 bitcoin, there are 41 of these standard denominations. If all clients prefer to create outputs in only those standard denominations, then there are going to be a higher number of equal amount inputs and outputs.

These developments are why Wabisabi has improved upon the original Zerolink protocol of Wasabi 1.0 and how Wasabi 2.0, powered by Wabisabi are breaking records everyday for facilitating some of the largest coinjoins ever while provided even the newest Bitcoin user access to the highest level of privacy.

The post The History of WabiSabi appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

We are fully aware of the gravity of our actions and had been even before the decision was made. By exploiting the only architectural flaw of Wasabi Wallet’s non-anonymously run coordinator: lack of censorship resistance; we broke one of the largest taboos of Bitcoin: blacklisting, to achieve something greater: survival of the best Bitcoin privacy technology. In doing this, we are giving Bitcoin’s anonymity a chance to thrive. The alternative, discontinuing zkSNACKs would have set back Bitcoin privacy for decades. Blacklisting by the default coordinator, while undesirable, is a small price to pay for the future of Bitcoin’s privacy. We even welcome the community outrage as it would be disappointing if there weren’t any; however, we want to clear up some of the speculation.

Second, it’s understood that a private company has the right to choose its customers and that the users have the right to complain. Thus, everything is as it should be. Although we would like to serve every single individual in this world, that cypherpunk utopia is not yet here. Most people do not understand Austrian Economics and libertarian values. In order to ensure the survival of the project, we can act in a way that society allows us to do, even if we are not philosophically aligned with that.

About going anonymous: at this point, it is impossible. Aside from feasibility, it’s also questionable if it’d be a good idea. As a legal entity, we can hire developers at the top of their fields ensuring rapid improvements to Bitcoin privacy.

In a Bitcoin Magazine article, one of the owners of zkSNACKs Ltd., Bálint Harmat said the decision to blacklist was done proactively. While it is correct that there’s no legislation that specifically says coinjoin coordinators must blacklist their customers’ UTXOs, the challenges encountered operating the business in even the most liberal jurisdictions are numerous and multiplying.

Wasabi Wallet is making Bitcoin anonymous and most people are afraid of the idea of anonymous money. They don’t care that it existed for thousands of years before the last century, nor do they understand the gravity of the fact that fungibility is an essential property of good money. Ignorance of first principles has resulted in unwanted media attention and claims of money laundering that we are obviously not trying to enable. Such claims by mainstream media have travelled far and ultimately led to legal challenges, which forced the company to choose between discontinuing its operations or introducing blacklisting so that the coinjoins can continue.

Without the zkSNACKs company, it would be more difficult, if not impossible, to continue funding the developers working on Wasabi 2.0. So after researching the options and a lot of thinking and debating, zkSNACKs Ltd, the company sponsoring the development of Wasabi Wallet, announced that the default coinjoin coordinator will start blacklisting certain unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs.)

The zkSNACKs coordinator having a blacklist does not mean Wasabi Wallet monitors or collects user data.

Our architecture is specifically designed to limit the power of what we can do. We still cannot breach our users’ privacy even if we wanted to. For example, all communication still goes through Tor, so the company has no information about coinjoin participants’ identity.

Any user of the open-source non-custodial Wasabi Wallet can still send and receive normally.

Finally, on the claims about the death of the project: we expected that after the announcement the liquidity of coinjoins would take a severe hit. Surprisingly, this never happened. The volume of new bitcoins being put into Wasabi coinjoins has slightly increased compared to pre-announcement levels. The theory put forward is based on the fact that the largest deterrence from coinjoining was the fear that users’ coins may be worth less after the coinjoin process due to their “proximity” to perceived “dirty” coins. So the increase could be explained by Wasabi coinjoins being now seen as a non-risky activity to participate in. Whatever may be the cause, we are happy to see Bitcoin’s privacy improve.

To conclude, after the past 2 years of research and development, we are convinced that Wasabi 2.0 is a revolutionary improvement to Bitcoin’s fungibility. Our ultimate goal is to bring privacy to Bitcoin users and blacklisting was a necessary move, enabling us to continue to do so.

The post zkSNACKs’ Blacklisting Update appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

With Japanese roots shared by the Wasabi plant and the Wabi-Sabi philosophy, we wanted to align our logo with our name. This involved integrating a Japanese aesthetic and incorporating minimalist yet harmonious elements into the design.

We still wanted to keep that shield-like feel from the old logo to show how serious we are about protecting our users’ privacy with our product.

Now, about that green dot—ever noticed how when you’re enjoying some sushi, you usually get a little dollop of wasabi on the side? That’s where we got the idea to sneak a bit of Wasabi green into our logo. Oh, and see that square? It’s our little nod to the blockchain.

We even flipped that side of the shield to create the second ‘W’. It’s these little details that make the design special, don’t you think?

Though our brand identity has changed, Wasabi Wallet aims to continue satisfying or exceed the existing expectations of what our original brand represents.

In the coming weeks, the team will transition from using its old logo to the new Wasabi Wallet logo and colour scheme on its official social media platforms.

The new logo should be found anywhere on Wasabi Wallet’s official platforms as well as in the upcoming Wasabi 2.0 software. However, the logo change will not involve any modifications to the nature or operations of the software.

Download Wasabi Wallet

The post Introducing the New Wasabi Wallet Logo appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Open source means that the programming, or source code, is open to everyone and anyone can see it.  Additionally, anybody can contribute to the development of the code and use the code in any way they see fit. It’s typically developed by people committing their free time to collectively writing, testing and updating the code. Most open-source projects are decentralized in that developers collectively agree on what or what not to merge into their core programming. This means that consensus has to be reached for progress to be made. As expected, the process can be painfully slow and achieving consensus is often next to impossible. A good example of this are all of the major changes that have happened with Bitcoin over its lifetime. For each, the process of achieving consensus took months of debate before the process of reaching consensus even began. In fact, it’s not uncommon for this to take years to go from conception to completion.

zkSNACKs is centralized when it comes to approving the source code. There are only 2 developers with permission to merge any changes. In an ecosystem where centralization is treated as a dirty word, the reasoning for this makes sense. Anybody can still contribute to the development, testing and checking of the code; but by limiting the final approval process to just two developers, it removes the lengthy process of reaching consensus. This, of course, vastly improves the speed with which changes can be implemented while maintaining all of the beneficial attributes of an open-source project.

zkSNACKs is a private company. Like most private companies, it generates revenue in an attempt to make a profit. But Wasabi Wallet is a free software…so how does zkSNACKs generate revenue from a product that is completely free? Most companies working on open-source software go into the business of consulting. But once again, zkSNACKs does not do this. Instead, it draws a marginal fee for operating the server that is coordinating the CoinJoin rounds. This means that the software is free to download. The wallet is free to use, but making your Bitcoin private through CoinJoin costs a marginal fee that is hardly noticeable to the user [0.003% of the amount times the anonymity set].

What is significant about this is that the money going to the company increases the privacy guarantees of all users. Because there is a small fee on every CoinJoin input, it is a verifiable cost that must be paid. In doing this, the honest user with one input (for themself) has a negligible fee. But for a malicious user attempting a Sybil attack (one entity simultaneously impersonating multiple users), the cumulative fee becomes substantial.

The way the company spends its revenue aligns much more with a charity than a for-profit business. The vast majority of the company’s revenue pays the salary for everyone working at the company. What are these people doing? Well, most of them are developers, some of them work on the marketing/public relations (myself included), some of them handle the support, and some of them are designing the UI. This means that instead of relying solely on the charitable contributions of time and skills to the development of its software, the company is providing these people with the means to spend all of their time focusing on the development and innovation of Wasabi Wallet.

Additionally, the money is also spent to fund bounties for the contribution games. Producing an open-source software is great, but you’re essentially competing against people’s full time jobs to get the attention from the contributors to focus on its development. Of course, there’s no competition when you’re not getting paid. As a hobby, there are intrinsic benefits to working on the project, but at the end of the day everyone has to pay their bills. By funding contribution games, the development of Wasabi Wallet can compete for your time, even against your regular job. It’s the equivalent of gig work for musicians. If you’re really good at contributing, the potential exists for gig work to become full time work (by being hired by the company, zkSNACKs). So the fact that zkSNACKs is being paid directly by Wasabi Wallet’s users whereas many other companies are paid through consulting services is a bonus since the users are financially contributing to making the software better.

Aside from all the contributions Wasabi Wallet has made to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling users to easily gain privacy, the company sponsoring the development of Wasabi Wallet is quietly making an equally significant impact on the way open source software is being developed. One can’t help but point out the irony behind what is essentially a privacy wallet developed through multiple contributions being supported by a company sponsoring the contributorily developed wallet which is, itself, making a profound contribution to the way open-source software is being developed.

The post Innovating Open Source Sponsorship appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

This is great because it fixes the two greatest pain points of Bitcoin: portability and fungibility. It puts Bitcoin on the path to becoming an anonymous, instant and free e-cash; the holy grail of cypherpunks: an ideal money.

If this would truly be the case we would not need to offer this grant, but unfortunately reality is more nuanced than this. Although there are things to be said about long term portability aspects of LN, much more work needs to be done on its privacy properties as was highlighted by numerous research papers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

Grant Design & Schedule

1.11 BTC will be distributed during MAGIC Grants Lightning Network Privacy Research Grants (0.555 BTC each). This grant is made possible by pledges from zkSNACKs Ltd. (Wasabi Wallet; 1 BTC), Dan Gershony (0.1 BTC), and the Wasabi Wallet crew (0.01 BTC).

We’re looking for researchers and teams of researchers to design, (not implement), the best possible privacy-focused Lightning Network light client. The scope of research is narrowed by the assumptions explained later in this article. Applicants may apply with a team or individually. Selected individuals will be formed into another research team.

Researchers are encouraged to apply by March 14th, 2022. The Lightning Network Privacy Committee will select the researchers by March 31st, 2022. Research teams will have until the end of the year to submit their research papers.

Both teams will receive 20% of the grant value (0.111 BTC each) up-front and 80% (0.444 BTC each) after the research paper has been reviewed and accepted by the committee.

In your application, you don’t have to write your or your team’s ideas because that task is for the research period. We want to hear about your exploration plans, experience and credentials instead. If you are interested, send your application to [email protected] by March 14th, 2022.

Narrowing The Research Space

We are not going to give an overview of Lightning Network privacy. Rather, we will describe already existing solutions, narrowing down the problem space for the researchers.

Technological Advancements

We’re building software for the future and not for the past. Therefore, we should assume certain technological advancements. For example, we can assume that in the future, computers will rarely be turned off (always on) and everyone will have a reliable and unlimited Internet connection (always online).

Network And Blockchain-Level Privacy

Let’s start with an ideal on-chain privacy setup. We assume Tor [7] for communication (notably for transaction broadcasting), full nodes or client side filtering for acquiring wallet state [8] and WabiSabi [9] CoinJoins to fix on-chain privacy issues. This is so far the setup for Wasabi Wallet 2.0 [10]. Furthermore, we’ll also assume Taproot [11] utilization so LN operations won’t be immediately noticeable on the blockchain.
Although we could assume LN operations with coinjoins and indeed that’s possible with Wasabi 2.0, we won’t because we’ll solely focus on privacy and the assumption that LN operations happen before and after coinjoins will suffice. LN operations inside coinjoins are efficiency improvements.
Finally we can also omit talking about trivial things like how to use Tor circuits properly, not sending unnecessary information to trusted third parties and why not use LN node ID, an alias that is leaking information about your setup or your real world identity. Privacy developers eat such problems for breakfast, assuming they aren’t doing intermittent fasting of course.

References

• [0] How Does the Lightning Network Affect Users Privacy?
• [1] An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network
• [2] A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network
• [3] A Cryptoeconomic Traffic Analysis of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
• [4] Security and Privacy of Lightning Network Payments with Uncertain Channel Balances
• [5] Security and Privacy of the Lightning Network
• [6] Privacy Guarantees of the Bitcoin Lightning Network
• [7] Tor Project
• [8] Network Level Privacy
• [9] WabiSabi
• [10] Wasabi Wallet 2.0 In The Finish Line — Introduction & Demo By The Lead Developers
• [11] Privacy and Scale — Everything you need to know about Bitcoin’s Taproot

The post 1.11 BTC Grant: Design a Privacy-Focused Lightning Network Wallet appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

In these 2.5 years, the same kind of transition has taken place. There have always been programmers since Wasabi Wallet is a software, but the owners handled everything. Now, there’s a marketing team, a UI team, a research team and code team aside from the owners. Interestingly, this city has even grown large enough to require superpowered crime fighters. Wasabi Wallet’s superhero team has recently been formed under the name: The Powerpuff Team, and despite not being nearly as cute or even being girls, the differences are not that vast.

Where Did This Name Come From?

Initially, it was easy to compare the team to the Powerpuff Girls since there were three interns and well, they fought bugs as the Powerpuff Girls fight criminals. They review all codes and fix all the bugs that appear since most of the (core) developers don’t have the time to review all the code. Their job is to maintain all of the incoming Pull Requests and check on the Issues that come in by the users or the developers, debugging them if it’s possible and develop new features.

However, more people have since joined and the aliases grew to accommodate each member:

• Balázs is Bubbles
• Adam P is Blossom
• Rafe is Bell
• Yahiheb is Bliss
• Nopara is Professor Utonium
• David is the Mayor of Townsville

Nopara73, aptly named Professor Utonium (the Professor), was an integral part of the selection process and continues to work closely with the team. He has also started to organize power programming meetings – sessions open to anyone who wants to learn more about fixing bugs and implementing new features.

Balázs, who is also referred to as Bubbles, is the scrummaster, or the moderator for the everyday meetings and assigns tasks to everyone. He reveals that he loves the flexibility and diversity of the tasks they get to work on while Adam P, or Blossom, completes tasks as they come in. He admits that his role has completely surpassed what he could have imagined:

“I thought the company would be much more like a big company where you get your table/chair/code and you have to sit there for 8 hours to work and you can’t even get up for a smoke break.” ~ Adam P (Blossom)

Instead, he works alongside seniors at the company, who also happen to be incredibly reputable within the industry itself, all while also learning about Bitcoin.

“We have someone close who knows the codebase top to bottom and doesn’t let us do stupid things…and the coworkers are awesome. Arriving at the office every day is like coming home.” ~ Adam P (Blossom)

Like every superhero team, the powerpuff team admits that they are constantly met with challenges, sometimes leaving them stumped:

“The QR code implementation that we are working on right now has a lot of conditions that have to be met. We are not the first ones who are trying to implement this the right way. It’s a challenge, but that’s what this is all about.” ~ Balázs F. (Bubbles)

Although the team has just been formed, they already have a sense that they’re working on something much bigger than themselves. Every superhero, except perhaps Deadpool, carries some form of intrinsic altruism that compels them to continue their work day in and day out.

“I’m being a part of something that could change the world. The concept of Wasabi is really great and useful. It really is a big thing in every way, just like Bitcoin is, too. I just don’t have all the knowledge to feel like I am irreplaceable, yet. But one day, I will be.” ~ Balázs F. (Bubbles)

The company is going to keep growing and one day, we will be comparing it to the likes of Metropolis, Gotham or even Wakanda. Undoubtedly, Wasabi’s bug zapping team will continue to develop but also encounter more challenges as time progresses. Stay tuned for the upcoming adventures of Wasabi’s Powerpuff Team.

The post Working at Wasabi: The Powerpuff Team appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Even though we have our own preferences at Wasabi, we will prioritize what’s best for our users.

Wasabi Wallet will support both sides of any meaningful bitcoin fork. We will not withdraw our support until we are sure our users are given enough time to sell the less successful side of the fork without compromising their security or privacy.

The post Wasabi Wallet Chain Split Policy appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.