Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Announced, Focusing On Privacy Ahead Of Mass Adoption

Wasabi Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, today announced Wasabi Wallet 2.0. It expects the product to release sometime in the next three to 14 months.

Wasabi Wallet is a free and open-source desktop wallet that leverages CoinJoin mixing to obscure transaction history by combining multiple bitcoin payments from multiple parties into single transactions, so that outside parties have a harder time tracing the individual transaction histories of each. It also has a Tor integration as an additional privacy measure.

According to the announcement, posted by lead developer nopara73, Wasabi Wallet 2.0 features a “complete UI rewrite” to improve design without removing features of the current software. “Manual CoinJoining” will be removed except for “power users.” And the anonymous credential scheme WabiSabi will be debuted, which is designed for constructing CoinJoin transactions using a centralized coordinator to enable more “cost-efficient, collaborative transactions without waste, lay the foundation for payments within CoinJoins and open the door for combinations with other technologies.”

The announcement framed the release as an important one around Bitcoin’s potential upcoming gains in adoption.

“Bitcoin’s sudden improvement in acceptability is detrimental to its portability, fungibility and temporarily to its scarcity properties,” per the Wasabi Wallet 2.0 announcement. “Therefore, our goal cannot be anything else but to make Bitcoin ready for mass adoption. To achieve this, we must start with its weakest link: privacy. Wasabi 2.0 may be Bitcoin’s last chance to scale gracefully.”

Though it will be some time before the release is in the hands of any actual users, it may be that Wasabi 2.0 offers new privacy protections at a time when they are becoming most needed in the space.

“Wasabi 2.0 is a next-generation Bitcoin privacy wallet that will finally bring confidentiality within reach of any Bitcoin users, not just the technically inclined,” per the announcement. “Wasabi 2.0 may be Bitcoin’s last stand in the fight for becoming ‘good money.’”

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