BlueWallet, a Bitcoin-based mobile wallet, just shipped its latest update. Among a litany of fixes, the wallet now allows users to mix coins, conferring additional transaction privacy.
The inbuilt mixer, known as PayJoin, is a CoinJoin variant occurring between two parties that obscures transaction origins, making them harder to trace.
BlueWallet CEO Nuno Coelho told the BTC Times that the integration comes thanks to the six-month-long efforts of various open-source tinkerers and developers.
"It is a no brainer in terms of implementation, it provides a good level of privacy, not only for those using it but also for the entire network in the future," Coelho added.
The update comes shortly after the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental anti-money laundering organization, issued a report on the so-called "red flag" indications of criminal behavior in crypto. The FATF emphasizes "transactions making use of mixing and tumbling services" among the various and somewhat vague warning signs of money laundering.
To top it off, on Monday, Europe's crime watchdog, Europol, specifically named privacy-enhanced wallet services using CoinJoin concepts as a "top threat."
For Coelho, the agencies are looking in the wrong place.
"I believe FATF concerns are related to money laundering, which is something happening in local currencies and on the legacy banking system at a much bigger scale than what happens on bitcoin," Coelho explained.
PayJoin itself is a regular bitcoin transaction that happens to break some assumptions on how transactions are made, particularly that all inputs belong to the sender. And that's a good thing.
Though stigmatized for their use in money laundering, mixing services and CoinJoins remain completely legal. There are, after all, many harmless reasons why one might deploy a CoinJoin - financial privacy chief among them.
MultiSig for Mobile
BlueWallet is also planning on implementing multisignature transactions within its mobile wallet to enable a group of two or more people to sign a single transaction - providing an extra layer of security.
"The first phase is deployed and in beta testing at the moment," Coelho said. "This includes importing wallets and spending feature. The next phase is the wallet creation and quorums that are under development at the moment. The goal is to bring a free open source multisig solution that anyone can easily learn, and use to exponentially increase their security standards."