zkSNACKs CEO assures Bitcoin privacy will persist despite CoinJoin shutdown

The Bitcoin (
BTC
) community is set to lose a valuable privacy-enhancing service as zkSNACKs announced its decision to discontinue its CoinJoin coordination service.
Max Hillebrand, CEO of zkSNACKs, spoke exclusively to Cointelegraph after the announcement and stated that the decision was made to ensure compliance with the latest legal and regulatory updates in the United States.
Hillebrand explained that the closure of the CoinJoin service was necessary due to the lack of clarity surrounding regulations in the US regarding cryptocurrencies and privacy-enhancing tools.
The announcement of the service’s discontinuation was met with disappointment from commentators, including former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.


According to Hillebrand, the Bitcoin ecosystem will inevitably lose an important service that helped users transact with increased privacy through the coinjoin mechanism:
Hillebrand also confirmed that Wasabi Wallet, the Bitcoin wallet developed by zkSNACKs that incorporated the CoinJoin service, will continue to function as a regular BTC wallet. Users can generate private keys to receive and send Bitcoin.
Despite the closure of the CoinJoin service, Hillebrand emphasized that Wasabi’s client-side filtering architecture, Tor integration, and custom coin selection still provide significant privacy for users. However, the level of privacy offered by CoinJoins will remain unmatched going forward.
Hillebrand refrained from speculating on whether similar crackdowns on privacy protocols and CoinJoin services would occur in jurisdictions outside the US.
The discontinuation of zkSNACK’s CoinJoin coordination service will also impact products and services across the ecosystem. Hardware wallet services Trezor Suite and BTCPayServer will no longer be able to offer the service to their users starting from June 2024.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Trezor for comment on zkSNACKs’ CoinJoin closure and whether it will consider using another Bitcoin privacy-enhancing service for its users.
Hillebrand provided an in-depth explanation of zkSNACKs CoinJoin service during an interview with Cointelegraph at Bitcoin Amsterdam in 2023.
As Hillebrand detailed, a CoinJoin service combines multiple inputs and outputs from various users into a single transaction, making it significantly more difficult for external observers to determine specific transaction details and obfuscating Bitcoin transactions.
Wasabi Wallet was launched in 2018 after extensive research. The wallet prioritizes anonymity by using Tor, employs a light client approach for balance checking without compromising privacy, and utilizes block filters to efficiently and securely verify transactions without downloading the entire Bitcoin blockchain.
Magazine:
Are Runes really an upgrade for Bitcoin? Currently, 68% of them are in the red.