According to Bloomberg News, the crypto firm behind the much-acclaimed digital wallet Wasabi that extends services to users and allows them to mix the Bitcoin holdings to keep users’ identity anonymous, stated that it is planning to reject a few transactions.
Keeping hackers and scam artists at bay
Through a post on Twitter at the beginning of last week, a Wasabi wallet developer stated that the company zkSNACKs had put efforts to keep the hackers and scam artists at bay so that they cannot use services, thereby being able to avoid trouble.
Bloomberg News reports that although there is no indication of a cause that triggered the decision, nor is it needed, the regulators and the law enforcement bodies are worried that if this type of mixing and tumbling of services is put into force, the mixing services can help anonymous users to evade illicit activities. This kind is being increasingly seen during the ongoing Ukraine and Russia wars.
Of late, the crime agency in the United Kingdom has called for extensive oversight of the protocols related to cryptocurrencies that let users make their crypto transactions obscure. However, a set of users argue that such restrictions must not be imposed in the services since these mixes allow users to maintain their privacy in the domain of public blockchains.
A mechanism known by the name CoinJoin is used by the Wasabi wallet that can combine Bitcoin from multiple senders and receivers. zkSNACKs plays a crucial role in CoinJoin by monitoring the coordination of the transactions. Since the nature of the zkSNACKs S service is centralized, it can ban transactions from specific addresses that go into specific CoinJoins.
Bloomberg News reports that the other mixing services that include the likes of Tornado Cash maintain the same transaction protocol on the Ethereum blockchain platform, usually have different operations. At the beginning of this month, a co-founder of Tornado Cash stated that due to the protocol being decentralized, there is no control of the creators over coding and research, thereby limiting the capacity to police it.
