In November of 2020 we announced Wasabi Wallet 2.0, which includes a new CoinJoin scheme, called WabiSabi, a complete UI redesign and significant UX improvements.
In the announcement we defined a probability distribution to estimate the time of arrival of the new wallet, which shall provide context for this status update.
CoinJoin
In January of 2020 we established a research team for the purpose of improving coinjoins in Bitcoin.
In June we published a cryptographic research paper, which aims to replace the currently utilized Chaumian Coinjoin scheme to enable greater flexibility for organizing output amounts in coinjoins. While we have already received a great deal of feedback on it from the Bitcoin community, it’s still awaiting peer review from the Academic community. Furthermore, we also completed our first production ready implementation, but we aren’t yet satisfied with its performance. After everything gets sorted out, an audit is still due.
We also specified our desired networking protocol, however the implementation work hasn’t started yet.
The final part is to work out how we’d like to organize output amounts and select UTXOs. There is little implementation work to be done here, rather its specification is the more challenging part. We’re currently trying to come to consensus on just how many of our ideas we should include in the first version. But what I can already say, is that our starting results are miraculous: we are already able to create coinjoins that are both orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than Wasabi 1.0 coinjoins. Red changes will rarely be created, nor will there be a need to have a minimum amount to coinjoin anymore. At last, the UTXO set of wallets will be more diverse and coinjoins won’t inflate the number of coins in wallets anymore.
UI/UX
On the UI front, the team is making some eye-catching progress. Functionality wise they implemented everything that does not require a wallet to be loaded and they are just about to move to the in-wallet features. After that, quality control and polishing is expected to take a place, too.
If you’d like to try it already, you can build Wasabi from source code and dotnet run within the WalletWasabi.Fluent.Desktop directory.
