The new way to make Bitcoin transactions anonymous
This new partnership is sure to make the US Treasury groan.
And just a heads up: this next bit might make your brain melt (it melted ours) - but we’ll explain!
Trezor, the cold storage, hardware wallet, has teamed up with Wasabi Wallet (the privacy project), to offer ‘CoinJoin’ - a Bitcoin Mixer, that can be directly accessed from your Trezor wallet.
Those are some hefty terms, so let’s break 3 of ‘em down.
Hardware wallets are used to store crypto in ‘cold storage.' Meaning the crypto is stored offline, which is generally believed to be the safest way to hold it. Trezor makes them.
Wasabi is a ‘privacy project.’ It's a hot wallet - meaning it is connected to the internet at all times - but it’s been built specifically with anonymity in mind, using the Tor network to keep each users location and data anonymous.
While Wasabi only supports Bitcoin, it’s never had any major security breaches.
A ‘mixing service’ groups a whole lot of transactions together, then distributes them out again, making the origins of the original transactions near impossible to track.
Got it? Alright. Back to the news…
With this partnership, users of the Trezor Suite app will be able to send their Bitcoin directly from their cold storage wallet, to 'CoinJoin' (Tezor and Wasabi Wallet's new joint creation).
This is a big deal because it removes a key step in the process for users.
Instead of going: cold wallet → hot wallet → mixing service → hot wallet → cold wallet; the new process will be: cold wallet → mixing service → cold wallet.
Easier
More secure
While CoinJoin does not hide the fact that you own Bitcoin, it does break the links between your old transactions and your new transactions.
Anyone who you transact with will no longer be able to track your past/future transactions.
According to the team behind Wasabi, financial transactions could be used to closely monitor what citizens do - and they don’t think that's how the world should work.
But after the US Treasury recently put another mixing service, Tornado Cash, on the sanctions list - this innovation could be short lived.
Who knows though, maybe it leads to the next leap in privacy innovations?
We’ll be watching.
