100 Bitcoin Users Perform What Might Be Largest 'CoinJoin' Transaction Ever

The community behind the privacy-centric bitcoin app Wasabi Wallet recently brought together 100 people to collectively execute a "CoinJoin" transaction on bitcoin in what might be the biggest event of its kind.

One effort to afford greater privacy to transactions is CoinJoin, a long-standing technology first proposed in 2013 by long-time bitcoin idea man and cryptographer Greg Maxwell.

At 100 transactions, Wasabi Wallet's effort might be the biggest, but it's certainly an advancement for the privacy tech as a whole.

"There wasn't any service created to do such large CoinJoins," zkSNACKS CTO Adam Fiscor told CoinDesk, which launched Wasabi Wallet last year to make CoinJoin transactions easier to use.

As Fiscor explained to CoinDesk, the event represented "The largest practical CoinJoin that can be done on the bitcoin network." That's because of some of the built-in restrictions on the bitcoin network, such as the limit on the amount of data that can be included in a single transaction block), as well as the human practicalities of getting so many people to transact together at once.

The transaction took a while to execute.

Going further, Fiscor hopes this large CoinJoin transaction offers a showcase of the norm for bitcoin's use into the future.

In short, the more transactions in a CoinJoin, the more privacy you get, because with more users it becomes harder to untangle all the transactions that initially went in.

Getting 100 people to join together for a transaction might seem like overkill, but Fiscor sees it as the future because the more transactions in one, the more efficient it is, too.

There's "Schnorr," for instance, a technology that could build in functionality into bitcoin to meld transaction signatures together.