Wasabi Wallet review

Wasabi still works, but the feature most people came to it for does not work the way it used to. On May 2, 2024, days after US prosecutors charged the founders of Samourai Wallet, zkSNACKs announced it would discontinue the coinjoin coordination service behind Wasabi's headline privacy feature, and switched it off on June 1, 2024. It cited regulatory uncertainty. zkSNACKs was not hacked, was not charged with anything, and no user funds were involved.

What that broke: Wasabi's coinjoins ran through a coordinator zkSNACKs operated, and other software leaned on the same one, including Trezor Suite's coinjoin feature and BTCPay Server integrations. Those stopped at the same time. Wasabi's own site now tells you to find a third-party coordination service provider and add it yourself, so coinjoin has not disappeared from the software. What has changed is who you trust to run a round: no longer the company that writes the wallet, and each coordinator sets its own fees and terms.

Everything else is intact and still being worked on. Wasabi is free, open source under an MIT license, bitcoin only, and self-custodial, with keys generated and stored on your own computer. All traffic goes over Tor by default, and it syncs using compact block filters, so no server learns which addresses are yours. It signs for Trezor, Coldcard, Ledger, Blockstream Jade and BitBox02 through HWI, offers full coin control, labeling and privacy suggestions that name who will learn about a payment, and can send to silent payment addresses, though it cannot yet generate or receive to one.

It is desktop only. Wasabi's own download page says plainly that it is not available on mobile, and serves Windows, macOS on both Intel and Apple silicon, and several Linux builds including ARM64. This record sits at caution for one narrow reason: install Wasabi expecting private-by-default coinjoin and you will find that choosing a coordinator is now your research problem, not the vendor's.