skip to main content
10.1145/3528580.3528585acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseiccConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The Unique Dressing of Transactions: Wasabi CoinJoin Transaction Detection

Published: 21 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

As Bitcoin’s blockchain allows third-party entities to track and analyse the transaction activity of Bitcoin users, external Privacy-Enhancing Technology services are created to satisfy the user demand for transaction privacy. These services are predominantly utilised as instruments in illegal activities. In this paper, we investigate one of the most prominent Privacy-Enhancing Technology services, Wasabi Wallet and its CoinJoin mixing function. We obtained Wasabi CoinJoin transactions for different time periods via published sources to observe the transaction patterns and changes in the obscuring mechanism. We propose a detection method derived from the discovered sets of transaction patterns. The results of our experiment show that the Wasabi Wallet has not substantially changed its CoinJoin mixing mechanism since the start of its operation and the majority of the Wasabi CoinJoin transactions are identifiable with significantly high precision. We also test the application of our detection method on several well-known cryptocurrency theft incidents and discover instances where the stolen Bitcoins directly reach the detected Wasabi CoinJoin Transactions.

References

[1]
David Chaum. 1983. Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In Advances in cryptology. 199–203.
[2]
Thibault de Balthasar and Julio Hernandez-Castro. 2017. An Analysis of Bitcoin Laundry Services. In Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems (NordSec). 297–312.
[3]
Europol. 2021. Europol Wasabi Wallet Report.https://www.tbstat.com/wp/uploads/2020/06/Europol-Wasabi-Wallet-Report.pdf. [Accessed: 2021-09-29].
[4]
Ryan Havar. 2021. Bustapay : a practical coinjoin protocol.https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0079.mediawiki. [Accessed: 2021-08-26].
[5]
Younggee Hong, Hyunsoo Kwon, Jihwan Lee, and Junbeom Hur. 2018. A Practical De-Mixing Algorithm for Bitcoin Mixing Services. In ACM Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Contracts (BCC). 15–20.
[6]
Artem A. Maksutov, Maxim S. Alexeev, Natalia O. Fedorova, and Daniil A. Andreev. 2019. Detection of blockchain transactions used in blockchain mixer of coin join type. In IEEE EIConRus. 274–277. https://doi.org/10.1109/EIConRus.2019.8656687
[7]
Felix Konstantin Maurer, Till Neudecker, and Martin Florian. 2017. Anonymous CoinJoin Transactions with Arbitrary Values. In IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS. 522–529. https://doi.org/10.1109/Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.280
[8]
Gregory Maxwell. 2013. CoinJoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world. https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=279249. [Online forum comment accessed: 2020-10-26].
[9]
Sarah Meiklejohn and Claudio Orlandi. 2015. Privacy-enhancing overlays in bitcoin. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security. 127–141.
[10]
Malte Möser, Rainer Böhme, and Dominic Breuker. 2013. An inquiry into money laundering tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In IEEE APWG eCrime Researchers Summit. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1109/eCRS.2013.6805780
[11]
nopara73. 2018. Wasabi Wallet 1.0 Is Released. https://nopara73.medium.com/wasabi-1-stable-f8bc5e48289f. [Accessed: 2021-06-02].
[12]
Samourai Wallet Developers. 2021. A holistic approach to CoinJoin. https://blog.samouraiwallet.com/post/186458671552/a-holistic-approach-to-coinjoin. [Accessed: 2021-07-09].
[13]
Tin Tironsakkul, Manuel Maarek, Andrea Eross, and Mike Just. 2020. Tracking Mixed Bitcoins. In Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. 447–457.
[14]
Rolf van Wegberg, Jan-Jaap Oerlemans, and Oskar van Deventer. 2018. Bitcoin money laundering: mixed results? An explorative study on money laundering of cybercrime proceeds using bitcoin. Journal of Financial Crime 25 (2018), 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFC-11-2016-0067
[15]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2018. How long does it take to mix my coins?https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/FAQ/FAQ-UseWasabi.html#how-long-does-it-take-to-mix-my-coins. [Accessed: 2021-06-06].
[16]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2018. Wasabi: Privacy Focused Bitcoin Wallet for Desktop. https://nopara73.medium.com/wasabi-privacy-focused-bitcoin-wallet-for-desktop-3962d567045a. [Accessed: 2021-06-06].
[17]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2019. Wasabi v1.1.10: The Unspendables. https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v1.1.10. [Accessed: 2021-07-05].
[18]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2020. Change coins. https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/using-wasabi/ChangeCoins.html. [Accessed: 2021-06-12].
[19]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2020. Wasabi v1.1.12 - To The Moon. https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v1.1.12. [Accessed: 2021-07-05].
[20]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2021. Announcing Wasabi Wallet 2.0.https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/wasabi-wallet-2/. [Accessed: 2021-09-29].
[21]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2021. How long does it take to mix my coins?https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/FAQ/FAQ-UseWasabi.html#how-long-does-it-take-to-mix-my-coins. [Accessed: 2021-07-09].
[22]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2021. Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Status Update.https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/wasabi-wallet-2-update/. [Accessed: 2021-09-29].
[23]
Wasabi Wallet Developers. 2021. What is the coordinator address?https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/FAQ/FAQ-UseWasabi.html#what-is-the-coordinator-address. [Accessed: 2021-07-09].
[24]
Lei Wu, Yufeng Hu, Yajin Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Xiapu Luo, Zhi Wang, Fan Zhang, and Kui Ren. 2021. Towards Understanding and Demystifying Bitcoin Mixing Services. In ACM WWW Web Conference 2021. 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3449880

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)JoinDetect: A Data-Led Machine Learning Approach to Detection of Coinjoin TransactionsProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good10.1145/3677525.3678633(5-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Blockchain CensorshipProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645431(1632-1643)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)BaseSAP: Modular Stealth Address Protocol for Programmable BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.336408119(3539-3553)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
EICC '22: Proceedings of the 2022 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference
June 2022
114 pages
ISBN:9781450396035
DOI:10.1145/3528580
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 July 2022

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Bitcoin Tracking
  2. CoinJoin
  3. Cryptocurrency
  4. Forensic Analysis
  5. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

EICC 2022

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)55
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)JoinDetect: A Data-Led Machine Learning Approach to Detection of Coinjoin TransactionsProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good10.1145/3677525.3678633(5-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Blockchain CensorshipProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645431(1632-1643)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)BaseSAP: Modular Stealth Address Protocol for Programmable BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.336408119(3539-3553)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Improving Cryptocurrency Crime Detection: CoinJoin Community Detection ApproachIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.323841220:6(4946-4956)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Analysis of Ethereum transactions during the prevention and investigation of criminal offensesLaw and Safety10.32631/pb.2022.4.0987:4(108-124)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2022

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media