Recent developments surrounding the two popular CoinJoin implementations Samourai Whirlpool and Wasabi Wallet have been quite intense, to say the least. The seizure of the official Samourai Wallet website and subsequent arrest of the two founders caught most of the Bitcoin community by surprise. The charges for money laundering and “unlicensed money transmitting” led to uncertainty in the industry, with some services quickly reacting by announcing to block US based users in the future.

Just a week after the indictment, zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi Wallet, notified users they will be shutting down their CoinJoin coordination service by the end of this month as well.

Putting the events of the past weeks aside for a moment, let’s take a closer look at how CoinJoin transactions actually work, how they’re different from regular “mixing” services and why users may want to use them in the first place.

... read more