A New Bitcoin Wallet Fulfills an Old Privacy Promise

This desktop-friendly bitcoin wallet, which can only be used with the anonymizing Tor browser, will be the first mainstream light wallet to offer CoinJoin transactions, dispatching lots of transactions at once to obscure their sources.

Samourai Wallet's Android app, arguably the bitcoin industry's leading privacy wallet since the project was founded in 2015, has garnered at least 27,000 downloads.

Most bitcoin wallets actually have thousands of addresses inside, he said.

He applied a so-called filtering solution first proposed by the bitcoin developer known as Roasbeef, which Fiscor said enables the wallet "To query how much money is in your wallet in a way that you don't connect your addresses together."

Although funds are otherwise viewable on the blockchain itself, Wasabi will be the only wallet that obscures from nodes how much bitcoin the total wallet holds.

The pseudonymous co-founder of Samourai Wallet, who goes by the initials SW, told CoinDesk his team views know-your-customer identity checks that connect bitcoin wallets to users' government-issued IDs or bank accounts, such as those implemented by platforms like Coinbase, as a "Fundamental attack on bitcoin and its users."

Rather, both Fiscor's recently founded Zksnacks startup, incorporated in Gibraltar, and the un-incorporated Samourai Wallet project were self-funded until launch then accepted bitcoin donations to expand the team to roughly five people each.

On the other hand, Samourai already has many other unique privacy features, including a stealth mode that hides the application so that anyone stealing the phone won't know it holds a bitcoin wallet.

Plus, Samourai Wallet offers remote commands to wipe a stolen phone clean and transfer the wallet to another device.

Venezuelan Samourai Wallet user Eduardo Gomez, head of support at the crypto startup Purse who earns his salary in bitcoin, told CoinDesk he uses features like Ricochet and CoinJoin because he fears platforms like Coinbase could freeze his account if he receives a bitcoin with a questionable transaction history.