Samourai raises concerns over rival Wasabi’s alleged lack of privacy

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Samourai Wallet, a crypto wallet that supports SegWitCoin (BTC) has called out its competitor on its lack of privacy. Samourai took to its Telegram channel to criticize Wasabi Wallet, another popular BTC wallet. According to Samourai, Wasabi has misled its users on just how private their transactions on the platform are.

Samourai explained, “With Wasabi if you are mixing 10 BTC, I can trivially track that 10 BTC as it is peeled down into smaller utxos. The left over change is part of the mix tx, and thus creates a deterministic link that follows it until completion. You literally leave crumbs along the trail.”

Wasabi uses CoinJoin implementation, a method for combining BTC payments from different senders into a single transaction. This makes it difficult to track a payment from one address to another. Wasabi has always hailed the method as full-proof, but Samourai believes there exist loopholes that can be exploited.

Apart from leaving a trail, Samourai believes that Wasabi’s outputs are easy to piece together as they follow a simple order. The message stated, “Additionally Wasabi outputs are in the order in which they are registered, allowing you to make educated guesses that cluster outputs that you can later cross reference when inputs are inevitably merged to make a spend (no postmix tools).”

Samourai relies on an enhanced version of the Chaumian CoinJoin known as Whirlpool. The wallet hails Whirlpool as the best privacy tool in the market, available on any platform and extremely fast.

“With Whirlpool you mix 10 BTC and the fee and utxo creation is handled in tx0. After tx0, upon first premix, all certainty is lost, there is no crumbs, there are no deterministic links, there is just the theoretical perfect transaction, for every utxo associated with tx0,” Samourai stated.

An executive at Samourai by the name SW further revealed that he had been able to link one of Wasabi’s donations to the Tor anonymous network to 38 fully mixed inputs.

He commented, “My point is not to kick a competitor when they are down, my point is, if this can happen to the experts who run Wasabi then this is absolutely happening on a broader scale with less sophisticated users, and they likely have no idea it is happening, let alone what steps they need to make to prevent it.”