The popularity of mixing, a technology designed to provide a higher level of anonymity on the Bitcoin network, has grown substantially over the past year. Thus, according to a recent report by LongHash , the number of transactions using the CoinJoin method has increased by 300% over the past nine months and today amounts to 4.09% of all transactions.

In its report, LongHash refers to data provided by the CTO to the zkSNACKs company by Adam Fichore. Recall that zkSNACKs is the developer of the Wasabi Wallet, which has built-in support for CoinJoin technology and is one of the most popular tools for anonymizing Bitcoin transactions today.

The main idea of CoinJoin technology is to mix (mix) the coins of different users and then merge them into one transaction. Normal transactions can be easily traced in a public blockchain, and this method allows to a certain extent to hide the relationship between the sender and the payee.

As can be seen in the graph below, the number of CoinJoin transactions has been steadily increasing since the middle of last year, although it still does not reach previous historical heights.

In particular, the largest number of mixed transactions accounted for 2011, then exceeding 7.5% of all payments in the network. This may be due to the fact that then the CoinJoin technology was just beginning to be tested, and the number of transactions in comparison with today was relatively small.

Another wave of growth was noted between the end of 2013 and 2014, and its main reason could be the integration of Shared Coin technology into Blockchain wallet in November 2013 . Shared Coin was an open source implementation of CoinJoin technology available at the time. However, on February 1, 2014, this function from the Blockchain wallets was, however, removed, after which the number of mixed transactions began to decline.

In 2015, the release of JoinMarket took place, after which the number of CoinJoin transactions went up again, but until August 2018 , when Wasabi Wallet was released, no serious growth was observed.

The increased number of transactions using mixing technology to date also indicates that more and more people are using Bitcoin for its original purpose – as a global payment method that is resistant to censorship.

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