Meet Wasabi, The Bitcoin Wallet That Features Privacy On A Public Blockchain

The creator of HiddenWallet, Adam Ficzor, recently unveiled a new type of wallet where Bitcoin users who are concerned about writing their financial history to a public blockchain won’t have to think twice anymore.

Wasabi is a desktop wallet that was unveiled at Building on Bitcoin 2018, which is an industry conference dedicated to new technical developments. Even though it was announced as a new implementation of the project known as HiddenWallet before, Wasabi has launched under a new company named zk-SNACKs.

As such, Wasabi is more than just an upgrade on HiddenWallet – but a completely different wallet rewritten from scratch and with a lot of new features.  Even though the interface doesn’t really impress, the real benefit of using Wasabi comes from its privacy on a public blockchain.

As ZeroLink-compliant, Wasabi uses Chaumian CoinJoin and enforces a constant 100 anonymity set. In other words, this wallet prevents blockchain analytics firms and other snoopers from spying on your transactions by “mixing” your coins with other users’ funds when a transaction is initiated.

Obviously, this makes it hard for any observer to decipher the sender and receiver of specific payments. Wasabi does all this without the help of a centralized coordinator. There is a light wallet too which can make Wasabi run without a full node.

According to Wiczor, the guy behind Wasabi:

“This is the only truly light wallet that is already deployed and that does not fail against network analysis, thus protects your privacy against network observers.”

Just like most of the mixing services, Wasabi charges a fee of 0.3% for mixing which is lower than the 3% fees charged by some services.

As Wiczor concluded:

“The 10 year anniversary of the Satoshi whitepaper is coming up. It would be great to be able to use bitcoin in a fully anonymous way with Wasabi wallet on that date. I want you to join your coin with mine.”