After zkSNACKs shutdown announcement, the future of Wasabi Wallet might seem uncertain. However, those are not depressing but exciting times for the project, and this Q&A-style post describes why.
Why is zkSNACKs shutting down?
Running a coordinator, especially for profit, involves many regulatory complexities. After careful consideration, they decided it wasn’t a path they wanted to continue pursuing.
What was the relationship between zkSNACKs and Wasabi Wallet?
The co-founder of zkSNACKs, nopara73, co-built Wasabi Wallet and co-authored the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol. His vision for zkSNACKs was to create a cycle where profits from the coordination service would be reinvested into developing better software. This collaboration allowed Wasabi Wallet to be well-funded and feature-rich, making it one of the best in the Bitcoin ecosystem, especially regarding privacy.
How will zkSNACKs shutting down affect Wasabi Wallet?
Wasabi will transition toward being more like other fully open-source projects with low and irregular funding. While Wasabi is already a fully functional, feature-rich Bitcoin wallet, maintaining and improving it without zkSNACKs’ funding will be challenging. Our focus now is to downsize the codebase, remove hard-to-maintain features, and make the software manageable for a few maintainers.
Can users still access their funds if zkSNACKs stops operating?
Absolutely. While some features like exchange rate and mempool updates will stop working, you can still open your wallet and send funds if zkSNACKs’ server goes down. We are currently working on making the wallet more resilient and backend-independent. Wasabi also enables connections to any backend, potentially leading to community-run backends. Last but not least, Wasabi Wallet is fully non-custodial and uses standard BIP39 seeds. You will always be able to recover your funds by entering the seed in another Bitcoin wallet.
What is the value of Wasabi Wallet without the ability to coinjoin?
Wasabi is much more than coinjoins. It’s available on most operating systems, includes Tor, uses BIP157 filters for synchronization, and employs various other privacy-preserving techniques such as change avoidance. Also, coinjoins are still implemented, and anyone can run a coordinator to gather users for coinjoins. In fact, we are already seeing many coinjoins with quite a lot of liquidity.
How can users discover a coordinator?
Currently, most coordinators are advertised through Nostr. There are software tools like WasabiNostr to discover them, pages tracking their liquidity such as LiquiSabi or wasabist.io, and the community also shares information. Wasabi Wallet does not promote any single coordinator, but we are working on an unbiased and spam-resistant coordinator discovery mechanism.
Is it risky to connect to a coordinator with no reputation?
Wasabi Wallet’s coinjoin client is designed to minimize trust in the coordinator. However, because zkSNACKs was the only coordinator, we’ve been complacent. Some attacks are possible to extract funds, but version 2.0.8.1 has significantly mitigated those risks. We are working to ensure it will be safe to connect to any coordinator and reduce attack surface.
How can someone run their own coordinator to coinjoin with their community?
The best way right now is using the BTCPayServer coinjoin plugin, which includes a customizable coordinator that is published on clearnet or as an onion service. We’re also working on integrating an easy way to run a coordinator directly from Wasabi Wallet.
Should Wasabi Wallet’s maintainers and contributors be worried about regulators?
No. Wasabi Wallet is an open-source tool for individuals seeking privacy and financial sovereignty. It’s not malware, doesn’t provide a service, and doesn’t generate revenue. It’s up to the coordinators and users to use our tools responsibly.
How can people help?
Contributions and funding are essential. We’re making it easier for open-source contributors, whether developers or not, to have a significant impact on the project. We’re also setting up donation channels for organizations and users to fund the project. Stay tuned for our first donation campaign announcement. Finally, simply use Wasabi Wallet and spread the word.
What about the long term? I’ve heard about Wasabi 3.
Our goal is to continue improving the best privacy-first Bitcoin wallet and set privacy best practices for the industry. We’re exploring changes for a hard fork of the coinjoin protocol to adapt to a more decentralized paradigm, including managing liquidity across coordinators, developing new revenue models for project resilience, and improving the engine in a small liquidity environment.
