Interoperability is an essential aspect of owning your digital identity. This means that you should be able to move your avatars and assets between different platforms, allowing you to maintain your digital identity across multiple platforms and ensuring that your investments in virtual worlds and social networks are not lost if you decide to switch platforms. The New Frontier Presents (NFP) Store is a great example of a platform that offers interoperable assets. They accept thousands of different tokens across…
The Wasabi Wallet – An Open-source, Privacy-focused Bitcoin Wallet
The Wasabi Wallet combines the security of a PC wallet with the privacy of advanced mixing protocols. The platform’s unique approach earned it a reputation as the ideal selection for anyone with privacy concerns. Users can store, manage, monitor, and mix their Bitcoin with ease utilizing the intuitive interface. Additionally, Wasabi integrates a new system to mix your coins using a purely trustless approach. Today, Wasabi is regarded as one of the top providers of non-custodial privacy-focused wallets.
Benefits of The Wasabi Wallet
The developers behind the Wasabi Wallet project wanted to bring true fungibility to Bitcoin. Over the years since its introduction, the development team worked hard to bring new features to the platform. Notably, Wasabi was one of the first easy to use options in the market to integrate full Segwit support, including bech32 addresses. This pioneering spirit is evident when you check out Wasabi’s impressive features.
How Does The Wasabi Wallet work?
The Wasabi Wallet was built to make Bitcoin privacy as streamlined as possible. The resulting hybrid wallet/mixer automates the entire mixing process. This strategy ensures that regular users receive the same benefits as advanced Bitcoin users. To accomplish this goal, all technical barriers had to be removed for the average user.
Mixer
Wasabi’s core feature is its integrated mixer. This protocol extends throughout the entire network and mixes coins from all wallets users between each other. Additionally, the system uses a multisig script to eliminate the need to trust the other party. This trustless approach makes it possible to distance mixers from their activities more effectively than a centralized mixing service.
Reduced Mixing Fees
This automated mixing protocol brings some considerable advantages to the market. Aside from making sure all of your coins are nearly untraceable, the mixing protocol is also far more cost-effective than centralized exchanges. Notably, your fee is based on the amount of anonymity sets your require. Each set comes with a fee. The actual fee equation is 0.003% per anonymity set. Crucially, developers recommend at least 20 anonymity sets for maximum protection.
Security
Wasabi is an open-source project that has undergone significant vetting from the community since its entrance into the market years earlier. Open source wallets are preferred because they allow the entire development community to review the code. These inspections reveal weaknesses or attack vectors that could have been exploited in the future by nefarious actors in the market.
Wasabi is a non-custodial wallet, so your private keys are stored solely on the device you installed the wallet on. Your private key is personal, and you are the only one who ever has access to it. If you lose this key or unwittingly share it with someone with ill intentions, there is nothing anyone can do to help you restore your lost crypto. Keenly, Wasabi is a Hierarchical Deterministic wallet that utilizes address reuse avoidance to obfuscate your satoshis further.
CoinJoin
To accomplish the monumental task of mixing coins anonymously, Wasabi developers integrated a trustless CoinJoin protocol over Tor. CoinJoin is a popular system requiring multiple parties to sign an agreement to combine their coins when engaging in separate Bitcoin transactions. While no approach is 100% effective at masking your Bitcoin transactions, this strategy is great at breaking the links between the source of funds and their next destination. Best of all, the integration of Tor keeps your IP address (your home address) safe and ensures that not even the CoinJoin coordinator cannot steal from or breach the participants’ privacy.
Privacy Protocols
All Wasabi network traffic goes via Tor by default. The Tor anonymity network is one of the most popular ways to browse the internet anonymously. Originally, Tor was used primarily by Dark Web users to remain anonymous. Nowadays, this technology has found mainstream use among privacy-focused crypto platforms.
Wasabi leverages a new type of validation that doesn’t require the system to broadcast a signal that could potentially be intercepted by hackers. Specifically, the network uses the BIP-158 Client-side block filtering mechanism to obtain its transaction history privately. The developers introduced a one-click partial full node integration to make the entire process as streamlined as possible.
Users gain a lot of say in the matter as well. For example, you can control which UTXO you use for each transaction. You can also keep track of your history with labeling. This customization level helps to guarantee that users get exactly what they signed up for full privacy.
Hardware Wallet Support
The Wasabi Wallet also supports several popular hardware wallets. Hardware wallets are the most secure way to store your cryptocurrency. Specifically, users can connect their Coldcard, Trezor, and Ledger devices directly to Wasabi and begin leveraging its easy-to-use interface to safely and securely manage their digital assets. Notably, hardware wallet users can send and receive Bitcoin but cannot CoinJoin the funds until they load the crypto onto the Wasabi Wallet directly.
How To Get The Wasabi Wallet
Getting started with the Wasabi Wallet is simple. You will need to head over to their website and click download to begin. From here, you must select the operating system of your PC. Currently, the Wasabi Wallet is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac. The download process takes only seconds to complete, and you will be prompted to install once it’s complete.
How to Use The Wasabi Wallet
The Wasabi Wallet was built in a manner that is geared to regular users. The interface is easy to grasp. You can send, receive, store, and mix your coins with a click. The first thing you will need to do is set up your wallet. To do this, you need to click the tab that says “Generate Wallet” on the top left. Form here, the system will raise a prompt with your seed phrase.
Write this seed phrase down and keep it safe. You will need to re-enter the seed phrase as the next step of your wallet initialization. This installation procedure is more common than ever because it ensures that the users have their backup phrase written down somewhere.
Wasabi Wallet – Simplifying Privacy One Mix at a Time
You have to hand it to the development team behind this project. The entire concept is exciting on so many levels. Since the earliest days of Bitcoin, privacy has been a core concern for users. The Wasabi Wallet introduces a novel way to provide users with the privacy they desire and the convenience they are accustomed to. For these reasons, the Wasabi Wallet will always have a home in the crypto market.