Kruw on Wasabi 2.8 and Upcoming Forks | SLP760

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me on the show today is Kruw. Kruw is working with one of the teams who does a coordinator for Wasabi Wallet, which is a privacy-focused wallet. Kruw is going to be joining me to chat about some updates on what's happening on the Wasabi side, as well as some upcoming hard forks, or forks in Bitcoin rather.
So yeah, first off, welcome to the show, Kruw.

**Kruw** (0:23)
Hi, yeah. Thank you for having me. I've learned a ton from your show in the past, so it's an honor to finally be on.

**Stephan Livera** (0:28)
Hey, thank you. So look, let's start with some of the updates on Wasabi. Now, it's been a while since we've spoken about Wasabi on the show.
Give us kind of the quick, what are the key things that people should know about Wasabi, at least nowadays, July 2026?

**Kruw** (0:43)
Yeah, absolutely. So we just had a huge release. Version 2.8 was our first major version in 10 months, so that's even slower than Bitcoin Core that releases every six months.
So if you haven't used Wasabi recently, I'll just give you a rundown of what its key features are. So it synchronizes using compact block filters to fetch your wallet addresses without giving them away to any third-party server. So this is, instead of fully verifying, like, you know, a Bitcoin Core node, you just download the blocks that your wallet needs that has its transactions in it and ignore most of the rest. You get a couple of positives, but that's okay because it improves your privacy just a little bit.
And then on top of that, it does all this synchronization through Tor, exclusively. It's not just a single Tor IP address. You get a new Tor IP address for every single peer you connect to, every single transaction you broadcast, every single interaction you make with the coordinator. Each uses a separated IP address. So, and this all happens under the hood. You have to click any buttons or even turn it on.

**Stephan Livera** (2:01)
Yeah. And so, as I understand, are you still doing that model where it's kind of automatically CoinJoining in the background sort of thing or not?

**Kruw** (2:11)
So that was the original plan when there was a default coordinator. There was a company called CKSnacks that was founded to sponsor the development of Wasabi. And in turn, they could collect CoinJoin fees.
However, because there's no longer a default coordinator, we've turned off the AutoCoinJoin feature by default, but you can just turn it back on after you select your coordinator. You'll get that same functionality, but it's just not automatically configured.

**Stephan Livera** (2:37)
I see. So it's there, but it's not on by default. Gotcha. Okay. And then so just walk through, like just quickly for users, what does the experience look like? As I understand, it's a desktop app, so you start it up and you have a receive address, so you can receive coins to that address. And then at that point, I guess you can either manually kick off a CoinJoin process or do the automated one. Is that roughly the process or just talk us through that?

**Kruw** (2:59)
Yes. So Wasabi is a desktop-only wallet currently for Linux, Mac, and Windows. There are malware versions of Wasabi in the App Store, so make sure you avoid those. So the process is pretty easy. It shouldn't interrupt your normal Bitcoin experience. So in the newest little bug fix version 2.8.1, we actually made Taproot the new default receive address. So when you click the receive button, you get your Taproot address displayed after you enter a label. So labeling is currently mandatory, so you have to keep track of where your coins are coming from or going.
After that, you can find a coordinator. Currently, there's just a link to the docs in the app, but there should be eventually integration that just scans and offers and presents you with the list of coordinators directly in your app.
So after you've selected your coordinator, then there's a little play button at the bottom, and you click that, and any non-private coins that you currently have in your wallet will get slowly converted into private coins over a series of CoinJoin rounds.

**Stephan Livera** (4:13)
I see. And then, what's the name? As I understand, you guys are the runners of one of the coordinators, as I don't know, but colloquially, you're the biggest one, right? So what's the name of your coordinator? So how do people know it's your coordinator compared to some other coordinators out there?

**Kruw** (4:28)
Yeah, that's a good question. So the coordinator I'm running is just an app running on top of my node. I originally started it with the, thanks to BTC Pay Server. There was a WabiSabi CoinJoin plugin there to where you could just click a checkbox that said Enable Coordinator, and boom, there you go. It's decentralized just as easily as the Bitcoin network is, with a little bit of caveat.