Wasabi wallets, owned by Bitcoin privacy company zkSNACKs has announced the release of the newly upgraded V 2.0 of their wallet. The Wasabi wallet V2.0 will enhance the privacy of every user and also improve on the user interface and design of the original service. The new version will come with WabiSabi, an upgrade that will shore up security measures in an anonymous manner.
The WabiSabi will allow for faster, more efficient collaborative transactions without waste, lay the foundation for payments within CoinJoins, and open the door for combinations with other technologies. The full scale of the WabiSabi protocol isn’t known yet, the white paper does indicate that the protocol does not utilize blind signatures, a cryptographic concept that sacrifices a degree of privacy and flexibility.
“I use wasabi wallet precisely because I dislike the thought of my transactions being watched. It is the same reason we close the toilet door when we do our business—not because we are doing anything illegal, but because we want privacy.”
The initial Wasabi wallets were more of a privacy focused Bitcoin “mixer” which was aimed at making transactions more secure through the process of CoinJoins, a process when different amounts of coins from different individuals are joined together in a single transaction. Transactions are then missed together which then results in hiding the identity information from the external bodies. For the new version coming onboard, manual CoinJoins is eliminated and for anyone that still wants to use these services can do so automatically. The current release also requires any users interested in using the coinjoin protocol must have a set amount of Bitcoin (BTC), the contributed set amount of Bitcoin then yields equal payouts. WabiSabi will however, allow users to theoretically contribute whatever amount they want irrespective of whatever amount their peers are spending.
CoinJoins has been an important protocol used by hackers and scammers to make funds anonymous and to ensure their privacy. The twitter hackers relied on coinjoin in order to mask the transaction tracking. The recent Kucoin hack also saw the hacker using the coinjoin protocol.
Speaking on this topic, Masutti said although it is sometimes for scams that it is also very beneficial to the general public or individuals who do just want to hide a certain information from the Bitcoin blockchain.
“not intended for criminals to launder money.” “There is no good money without privacy,” said Masutti. “We strongly believe that the positive sides outweighs by far the use of it for malicious activity [sic].”