Wasabi Wallet’s latest Juggernaut release 2.0.6 adds new hardware devices, privacy & performance improvements and more.

Budapest. February 29th, 2024—Wasabi Wallet has released a new software update with its 2.0.6 version. The Juggernaut release 2.0.6 contains significant performance and privacy improvements and It adds compatibility for two popular open-source hardware devices: Blockstream Jade and BitBox02.

Safety Coinjoin & Time Preference

Sometimes users send bitcoin to their wallet for the first time, coinjoin once, and then sweep their funds in one single transaction into cold storage. While an empty hot wallet is good for security, this behavior can have potential privacy drawbacks. To accommodate this behavior, Wasabi Wallet is releasing a new ‘Safety Coinjoin’ feature which is aimed at protecting user privacy with at least two coinjoin rounds for the first Bitcoin deposit into an empty wallet. This new default feature prevents new users from making coin consolidation mistakes. 

Improvements to the coinjoin time preference setting provide better privacy and smarter fee control for users that wait for the cheapest opportunity to coinjoin.

Blockstream Jade and BitBox Hardware Devices

This new release introduces support for two popular hardware devices: Jade from Blockstream and BitBox02. These hardware integrations allow users to protect their bitcoin holdings in cold storage while using the coinjoin feature from the hot wallet on the same desktop app, bringing convenience, security and privacy to a larger group of users. 

New RPC Calls & Payments In Coinjoin

The RPC server has seen a major improvement with 11 new RPC calls available. Chief among them is payments within coinjoins, a feature not yet available on the desktop app interface. It allows users to save fees and improve privacy by sending coins directly to the final destination in a coinjoin transaction instead of performing each step separately. Other RPC calls include: fee rate for payments, anonscore & coinjoin status in get wallet info, recover wallet, speed up transaction, cancel transaction, load wallet, list wallets, exclude from coinjoin, list payments in coinjoin, cancel payment in coinjoin,start coinjoin sweep and fee overpayment protection overwrite. The RPC server can now be exposed as a Tor onion service.

Speed & Performance

The desktop app launch was significantly improved such that users can now benefit from a tighter delay when starting the wallet on their computer. This performance improvement reduces CPU usage and memory consumption by half. The overall wallet load time was slashed by at least 60%, which is due to transaction processing being much more efficient and transactions being stored in a local database instead of a single text file. Major speed benefits can be enjoyed by users of HDD computers. 

User Experience Improvements

Users can now rename their different wallets directly from the interface in the Wallet Settings. Privacy warnings and suggestions displayed while sending now use unique colors to alert users if they are making a non-private transaction. The wallet creation flow was also cleaned up to make the onboarding easier. Success screens are now closed automatically, saving users extra clicks. Discreet mode has been further expanded to hide suggested address labels at address generation. 

Further Improvements & Bug Fixes 

For businesses and users managing large wallets with lots of activity along with smaller wallets: cross-wallet performance was improved to run distinct wallets in parallel on the same computer. Users running the Wasabi executable can use the –help flag in the console to get options for which arguments to pass. The software was upgraded to Avalonia 11 bringing numerous performance benefits for the GUI. .NET 8 was also a major framework upgrade. Nix flake was configured to improve the backend deployment flow from GitHub for users looking to run their own coordinator. UI memory leaks have been fixed. The Coldcard hardware device edge firmware integration had bug fixes. The PGP key to securely report software vulnerabilities was changed. 

“This juggernaut of a release comes packed with all kinds of performance improvements. The wallet is faster to load, the UI is more responsive, and coins get more privacy for less blockspace. Safety coinjoins are introduced to protect new users from undoing their privacy progress. Thanks to the contributors for putting this one together!” – Max Hillebrand, CEO of zkSNACKs and Wasabi Wallet Contributor 

“Our mission at BitBox is to offer the easiest self custody experience possible. We are excited for this integration with Wasabi wallet, that will allow BitBox users to enhance the privacy of their coins, in a simple way” – Douglas Bakkum, CEO at BitBox

About Wasabi Wallet

Reclaim your privacy with Wasabi Wallet, a free and open source bitcoin wallet with built-in coinjoins. Coinjoins are collaborative bitcoin transactions to enable cash-like privacy features for bitcoin. wasabiwallet.io 
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