Privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Wasabi Wallet announced on Sunday it would start preventing certain unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) from joining its CoinJoin rounds, sparking surprise[1] and rebellion[2] on Twitter as users wondered why the project would make a decision supposedly contrarian to the uncensorable ethos of Bitcoin.
However, the decision will only be enforced by Wasabi’s default coordinator[3], a centralized entity tasked with[4] building the CoinJoin transaction with the inputs provided by Wasabi users that is run by the company behind the Wasabi project, zkSNACKs.
“The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins,” Wasabi tweeted[5] on Sunday.
The surprising move led many to believe[6] that some regulatory pressure must have been applied to compel the company to take such an unpopular route.
However, zkSNACKs co-founder and CEO Bálint Harmat told Bitcoin Magazine that the decision to prevent some users from leveraging Wasabi for their privacy needs was a proactive one as there is no current legislation obliging them to do so.
“People started to identify Wasabi with illicit activities and actors, and we wanted to differentiate ourselves from these players in the space,” Harmat said, adding that the route taken on Sunday was zkSNACKs’ solution to enforce it.
Harmat explained that the company doesn’t want to be associated with criminal activity of any kind, adding that multiple reports over the past year linking hackers, money launderers and other nefarious actors with Wasabi and zkSNACKs have in part prompted the move as such an angle hurts the brand’s image.
“We were always against using [CoinJoin] for illicit activities, and as far as we could see from the news, lots of actors started to take advantage of the software,”
