Frequently Asked Questions

For more detailed information, check the docs https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/

I tried to recover my wallet, why is the transaction history blank?

When recovering your wallet using the 12 word seed phrase, you have to use the exact same passphrase that you chose when creating the original wallet. The passphrase acts as the "13th word" of your recovery seed, write it down and do not forget it.

The timer in the countdown box reset, why didn't my coinjoin complete?

All of the participants in a coinjoin have to sign it in order for the transaction to be valid. When someone enters a coinjoin and disconnects before signing it, it will cause the timer to restart for the other participants. Non-signers are temporarily blocked from participating in the next round, so honest users with stable Internet connections will eventually build a successful coinjoin.

Are there limits on coinjoining?

A UTXO must have a value of at least 0.00010000 BTC and be less than 1,343.75 BTC to coinjoin. If you are stuck at 99% privacy progress, check the "Wallet Coins" menu to see if you have a UTXO with a value that is too low to participate. Hovering over the shield icon in the transaction preview screen helps you avoid creating small change UTXOs from payments you send.

Can I coinjoin from my hardware wallet?

Linux or MacOS users can unlock the coinjoin account on their Trezor hardware wallet. This open source feature is no longer maintained, so there is no support available if you choose to enable it.

Bitcoin Privacy Guide

Bitcoin is a verifiable public ledger. You can follow the history of any coins spent in a transaction all the way back to when a miner initially created those coins from a block. Blockchain transactions can often be analyzed to link different addresses used by the same person together. Coinjoin transactions can be used to defeat these analyzation tactics and protect financial privacy.

We are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization - and Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them. - Hal Finney

Network level privacy

Regardless of whether you are using Bitcoin or some other Internet connected application, your IP address is revealed when communicating over the network. An IP address will indicate your physical location and potentially other personal information collected by your provider.

Tor is a network that encrypts your traffic to mask your IP address. Connections over Tor are wrapped with 3 layers (like an onion) and passed through a network of relays. Each relay only can see one layer at a time, so no one can view the origin or destination of the traffic.

Wasabi Wallet uses Tor by default for every operation. Each transaction broadcasted, block downloaded, coinjoin input registered, and coinjoin output registered uses a brand new IP address so your actions can't be linked together using network analyzation.

Synchronization privacy

In order to know how much money is in your wallet, you need to know the current state of the Bitcoin blockchain. This requires either running a full node to check yourself like BTCPay Server or JoinMarket, or asking someone else's full node to check for you. Many light wallets share your entire transaction history with a third party server to look up your balance. This can leak even more information about your transactions to the server beyond what is already publicly visible on the blockchain.

Wasabi Wallet synchronizes in a lightweight way without your sharing addresses with anyone. BIP157 and BIP158 describe how compact block filters are used to reduce the amount of data required to synchronize by ~99%. Your client scans these filters for transactions that belong to you and downloads the exact blocks that contain them.

Blockchain privacy

A coinjoin transaction combines inputs from multiple users into the same transaction. Outputs are created with identical values to maximize privacy. Large coinjoin transactions containing inputs from many users provide a greater amount privacy compared to small coinjoin transactions with few participants.

Coinjoin explained:

Coinjoin remixing:

You can read more about the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol from the mailing list post and the research paper.