Enhanced CoinJoins

Second-generation CoinJoin projects like Whirlpool, WabiSabi, and SNICKER introduced larger anonymity sets and coordinated payouts between 2018 and 2024. Here is a quick tour.

Whirlpool

• 2019: Samourai launches Whirlpool with cyclical “mix to remix” logic.
• 2020–2022: zkSNACKs implements WabiSabi to allow unequal outputs while maintaining privacy.
• 2023–2024: Research like SNICKER/JoinMarket v0.9 explores payjoin-style mixes without centralized coordinators.

Why Enhancements Matter

• Payjoin, Stonewallx2, and other techniques hide mixes inside ordinary-looking spends.
• WabiSabi’s keyed credentials allow unequal outputs so users can consolidate without leaking value.
• Whirlpool’s “mix-to-remix” increases anonymity sets over time.

The CoinJoin explainer covers the underlying math; this page captures the newer UX and policy debates referenced in Evolving Regulation.

Future Work

Developers are experimenting with federated coordinators, blinded liquidity credentials, and covenant-based designs to embed privacy deeper into Bitcoin.

OKEx Korea and Upbit remove XMR and ZEC after FATF issues the travel-rule guidance. European brokers begin geofencing German and Dutch IPs.

2020–2021: Bithumb, Coincheck, and Australia’s Independent Reserve ax privacy pairs. Binance restricts XMR margin products in multiple regions.

2022: Kraken delists XMR for U.K. customers after FCA pressure; Huobi exits the privacy market globally; FTX (pre-collapse) reclassifies Monero withdrawals as "manual review only."

2023 onward: Coinbase halts inbound XMR transfers entirely, and EU MiCA consultations single out mixers and privacy coins for "optional disintermediation" clauses.

Where exchanges complied most aggressively—South Korea, Japan, the U.K.—lawmakers cited ransomware narratives and the difficulty of satisfying the "travel rule" with shielded transactions.

Why Exchanges Folded

1. Correspondent banking choke points: Fiat partners threatened to terminate settlement accounts if platforms left XMR live.
2. Licensing leverage: Regulators tied VASP renewals to "enhanced transparency" commitments, effectively forcing delistings.
3. Analytics vendor lobbying: Chain-surveillance firms framed privacy coins as "un-scorable" to upsell new monitoring tools.

Meanwhile, privacy coin communities argued that the same exchanges happily listed outright scams. Delistings hurt volume but did not eradicate Monero: OTC desks, peer-to-peer swaps, and second-wave private exchanges filled the gap.

How Users Adapted

• Peer-to-peer markets: Platforms like Agoradesk and Robosats became primary on-ramps for Monero.
• Atomic swaps: Atomic swap bridges let users move between BTC and XMR without centralized custody.
• Decentralized liquidity: Community-run liquidity bots recycled XMR liquidity into wrapped assets and stablecoins.

Regulators never proved that delistings reduced crime; instead they pushed liquidity into less supervised venues. That mirrors the lesson from exchange freezes: compliance crackdowns usually punish ordinary users first.

Implications for Mixers and Wallets

Mixers seldom rely on privacy coins directly, but delistings forced them to reconsider payout options. Some services added XMR withdrawals to let customers escape tainted BTC, while others doubled down on CoinJoin tooling. Wallets that integrate swaps (e.g., Feather, Cake) became essential bridges between Bitcoin privacy tools and the XMR liquidity layer.

Author

NotATether

Bitcoin privacy researcher and maintainer of BitMixList. Focused on mixer history, enforcement timelines, and practical privacy workflows for users operating in high-friction jurisdictions.