CoinJoin is an anonymization method for bitcoin transactions proposed by Gregory Maxwell, the Bitcoin Core developer. It is based on the following idea: “When you want to make a payment, find someone else who also wants to make a payment and make a joint payment together.” When making a joint payment, there is no way to relate input and outputs in one bitcoin transaction and thus the exact direction of money movement remains unknown to third parties.
On October 31, on 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin protocol as an idea, with the help of CoinJoin the largest anonymous transaction to date was done. The transfer in the amount of 34.30709811 BTC (nearly $217 000 at current exchange rates) was initiated by Wasabi Wallet developer Adam Ficsor (nopara73).
The Wasabi Wallet is a bitcoin wallet which focuses on enhancing the privacy of BTC transactions through the use of CoinJoin and other methodologies.
While announcing the release of Wasabi Wallet 1.0 on October 31, Adam Ficsor wrote:
“I am speechless. Anonymous Bitcoin… at last. The past three years of my life has been leading up to this moment. Announcing the 1.0 release of Wasabi Wallet makes me excited, but also… terrified. Once in a while something happens that completely changes the course of history and this is such a moment. It is a truly historic one. If it goes well, after Bitcoin takes over the world, we will live in a free one, and not in an enslaved one. There is still a lot to do. A lot to build, a lot to refine, but the genie is out of the bottle and it will be bloody hard to stop it”.
The wallet intends to improve fungibility of bitcoin. Fungibility is the concept that every bitcoin is interchangeable regardless of who has held it or what purpose it has been used for. A lack of fungibility is a dangerous economic precedent, and technologically it is avoidable. CoinJoin is a method of improving fungibility by allowing “tainted” coins into “legitimate” transactions.
Wasabi Wallet has CoinJoin built in. To participate in a CoinJoin one must be transacting more than 0.1 BTC.