The Whale Release

This release enhances coinjoin experience for whales, optimizes UI and includes bug fixes for increased coinjoin reliability.

After the previous release of Wasabi optimized Tor connectivity, new records have been set in monthly coinjoin rounds’ completed and total coinjoin volume. Now, Wasabi Wallet Version 2.0.2.1 is available to continue leading the charge.

In the past, large bitcoin holders have had a sub-optimal experience coinjoining funds. This release alleviates coinjoin pains of bitcoin whales by improving several factors hindering optimal user experience. In previous Wasabi Wallet versions, the largest amount per input a user could register to coinjoin was 1,374.38953472 BTC. Now, even bigger whales can coinjoin with amounts supported up to 43,000 BTC per input. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and only 14 addresses own more than 43,000 BTC.

For large amount coinjoins, multiple inputs were often consolidated in the same output, while the output as a whole inherited the lowest anonymity score of the inputs used to create it. Whales may have experienced their larger inputs that had already accumulated high anonymity scores getting consolidated with inputs that had lower anonymity scores, forfeiting part of the privacy progress that had already been achieved. Now, progress goes one direction instead of two steps forward and one step back: automatic coin selection won’t combine high anon score coins with lower ones going forward. This saves fees and blockspace.

“Blockspace efficiency is one of our highest priorities, we always want to avoid wasting the sats of our users. This release saves whales a large amount of mining fees.” ~ Max Hillebrand, Wasabi Contributor and CEO at zkSNACKs

Improvements & Bug Fixes

Tor version 0.4.7.11 is included along for the ride, with major fixes aimed at helping defend against network denial of service. The coordinator will now pay the transaction fee for the bytes used in transaction creation overhead.

2.0.2.1 also includes a number of bug fixes aimed at increasing coinjoin reliability. Creating a coinjoin transaction is a team effort, so even if your client is behaving normally, a bug in one of the other participant’s clients can interrupt your efforts as well. This can lead to a frustrating experience where users have to wait longer than necessary for the coordinator to find other peers who are both online and cooperative. These frustrations are alleviated with the coffee for sleeping computers and input inclusion fixes.

Coinjoins require interactivity with other users with several rounds of communication needed to select inputs and claim outputs. Idle Mac users would sometimes find their machines falling asleep halfway through communication, interrupting the round and requiring the other participants to restart the coinjoin signing process. This would cause the Mac user to be “banned” for a short time period, requiring them to wait before attempting to coinjoin again.  Macs will now stay awake to finish what they started, improving the stability of coinjoin rounds.

Another bug affecting the completion rate of coinjoin rounds was the wallet permitting users to double spend inputs that are simultaneously pending confirmation in a coinjoin transaction.  Users can no longer manually select these UTXOs to spend, further increasing the reliability of coinjoins for other participants. For this purpose auto coin selection was improved as well, fixing a bug that used more inputs than necessary when building a transaction.

The auto download new version feature (already available in previous release) now comes with additional signature verification. Before downloading and installing the latest version, Wasabi verifies the API source by downloading a unique Wasabi ECDSA signature which is then verified by the in-code-provided public key. Then, upon success, it continues to download the installer and it compares the file’s hash with the provided SHA256SUM hashes, created and provided on GitHub upon a new release. Note that this feature is only available on Windows and macOS.

Last but not least, a number of improvements to the UI makes finding and using wallet features flow more smoothly. Details of a transaction can be quickly displayed by double clicking on it in the history list. A unique icon is now displayed for clusters of 2 + coinjoins in transaction history. Interfaces were rearranged and redesigned so that resizing the application to the minimum resolution no longer causes overlapping text or scroll bars. Other small fixes include automatically closing unnecessary windows after users update their settings, aligning unevenly spaced labels and calming down some flashing text.