Wasabi Wallet

On March 1st, 2027, the Wasabi indexer server, which provides compact filters to older versions, will be shut down.

Here's the fully corrected text:

"Compatibility passphrase was used! Please consider generating a new wallet to ensure recoverability!"

If Wasabi has been displaying that message to you for the last 5 years, well… it's time to take action.

tl;dr

Because of a clipboard bug on macOS (OSX) in the Avalonia UI framework, users who created wallets by pasting complex passwords (with non-ASCII characters) got their password silently corrupted. When they later tried to log in by typing the correct password, it didn't match.

When a user enters their passphrase, if it is incorrect, Wasabi derives the corrupted passphrase and tries that one instead — in case of success, it alerts the user with the warning message above. We assume that after 5 years without any news about this issue, no one is affected. We will still give months before removing it.

Long version:

Some users were locked out of their wallets after updating Wasabi because the password they entered when logging in didn't match the password stored in the wallet file.

The Root Cause

There was a clipboard bug on macOS (OSX) in the Avalonia UI framework. When a user pasted a password from the clipboard:

1. Avalonia retrieved the clipboard content as raw bytes plus a "size" value.
2. The size was incorrectly taken from the string length (number of characters) instead of the byte length.
3. This matters because UTF-8 encoding uses variable bytes per character — special characters (like ä, ö, ñ, ¾) use 2–4 bytes each, while ASCII characters use 1 byte.

Example: A password like "Café" has 4 characters but takes 5 bytes in UTF-8 (C-a-f-é, where é = 2 bytes). The buggy code would only read 4 bytes, giving "Caf" plus a partial/corrupted character.

What Happened

Users who created wallets by pasting complex passwords (with non-ASCII characters) got their password silently truncated and corrupted. The wallet was created with the buggy password, but when they later tried to log in by typing the correct password, it didn't match.

The Fix

The compatibility feature tries multiple password variations when logging in:

1. The exact password entered.
2. The "buggy clipboard" version (truncated to string length in bytes).
3. A variant where the last character might be the replacement character \ufffd.

If the original password fails but a buggy variant works, the user is warned: "Compatibility passphrase was used! Please consider generating a new wallet to ensure recoverability!"

This allows affected users to access their funds while warning them that their wallet was created with a corrupted password (which would be unrecoverable using standard BIP39 tools).

Tor 0.4.8 and earlier versions will stop working after September 1st, 2026.

This means that Wasabi versions older than v2.8.0 will stop working as well.

Latest Wasabi version v2.8.1 is not affected. Please upgrade.

We are proud to announce that Wasabi Wallet v2.8.1 is out. It sets a major milestone which took more than a year to achieve: to make Wasabi unstoppable.

🚨 New release 2.8.0 is here

⚙️ P2P synchronization for compact filters 🚀 Pay in coinjoin ♻️ Payment batching 📎 Support for arm64 Linux, Tails, and Whonix 📜 Scheme scripting language ↘️ Sub-1 sat/vByte transaction fees 🔑 Signet test network 💀 Forward compatibility for Tor

Feature Highlights

⚙️ P2P synchronization for compact filters

No central server needed anymore — Wasabi now runs fully independently.

🚀 Pay in CoinJoin

Make payments straight from CoinJoin, so privacy is preserved in everyday use. (experimental)

♻️ Payment batching

Batch outputs into one transaction for lower costs and smarter blockspace use.

📎 Support for arm64 Linux, Tails, and Whonix

Renewed support for the privacy-preserving operating systems we should never have abandoned.

📜 Scheme scripting language

Wasabi is now programmable what makes it easier to integrate with AI agents and tooling. (experimental) It doesn't have access to your money.

↘️ Sub-1 sat/vByte transaction fees

Pay less; hodl more. Available for Wallet and Coordinators which can also use this to make coinjoins cheaper.

🔑 Signet test network

Why not?

💀 Forward compatibility for Tor

The trigger for this release. After Sept 1st Tor clients from 0.4.8 (included in previous versions of Wasabi) will stop working.

📖 Read more here: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.8.0

There hasn't been a single day we weren't working on improving Wasabi. Stay tuned.

We are proud to announce that Wasabi Wallet v2.7.0 is our first release fully distributed through Nostr.

Instead of relying on GitHub or DNS, clients now receive update notifications directly from notes published by Wasabi’s Nostr public key. This ensures that even in the event of infrastructure outages or black swan scenarios, we can deliver emergency fixes seamlessly.

For users, the update process remains unchanged: smooth, secure, and reliable. For the project, this marks an important step toward resilience: guaranteeing that users will always be able to securely access their funds with Wasabi, without sacrificing privacy by restoring seeds on less private wallets.

Of course, we also want to thank relay operators for making it possible to implement features like this.

🚨 New release 2.7.0 is here! 🚨

v2.7.0 is a stabilization update that boosts reliability while bringing a fresh look & smoother performance.

🟠 Enhanced Node Integration 🎨 Refreshed UI ⚙️ 1 Config/Network 🤯 Smarter Coordinators 🛠️ Many Bug Fixes

👉https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.7.0

🟠 Enhanced Bitcoin Node Integration

Bitcoin node connectivity is now more seamless. RPC endpoint handling has been refined for smoother setup, with support for onion-service RPC interfaces.

Additionally, Wasabi no longer bundles bitcoind binaries, while block downloading has been simplified and made more dependable.

🎨 Refreshed UI with Icons & Animations

The interface has been given a polished update. Subtle animations and a balanced color scheme breathe new life into Wasabi’s design, making it both cleaner and less aggressive.

⚙️ Dedicated Config Files Per Network

Each network Mainnet, Testnet4, and Regtest — now has its own independent configuration file. Switching to test networks is easier and your preferences are always preserved.

🤯 Stronger & Smarter Coordinators

Coordinators are automatically published as onion services right out of the box: no manual Tor setup needed. Coordinators can now also run on pruned nodes in blocksonly mode.

Plus, fallback fee rate providers were implemented (mempool.space and blockstream.info), ensuring accurate fee estimates, even if your node can’t provide them.

🛠️ Refinements & Fixes

• Full-RBF by default: All transactions are treated as replaceable.
• Resilient HTTP communication: Smarter retry handling makes connections sturdier.
• Seed recovery fixes: Annoying typing issues are resolved.
• Sharper fee estimations: Precise decimal calculations with no rounding loss.
• NBitcoin updated to 8.0.14: Latest Bitcoin protocol improvements included.
• Clearer terminology: “Backend” is now called “Indexer.”
• Lean codebase: Legacy components like TurboSync and BlockNotifier removed.
• Safer Coinjoin handling: Excluded Coins can only be changed when Coinjoin is paused.
• Donation Button removed from Main Screen: The button is gone, but donations are still possible via the search bar.
• Conflux by default: Better Tor configuration for improved connectivity.

If you use Wasabi with your own node, please make sure that you are running Wasabi v2.6.0.

Previous versions are affected by an issue that makes the client unable to process blocks 896727 and 897389

Clients running v2.6.0 or not connected to a specific node are not affected.

New skin for our website https://wasabiwallet.io/ 👀

This page weighs only 125 kb (156x less than previous version!), doesn't use javascript, and present most of the core values and features of a FOSS Wasabi Wallet!

🚨 New release 2.6.0 - Prometheus is here!

Wasabi Wallet v2.6.0 "Prometheus" marks a significant milestone in our survival strategy, delivering major improvements in resiliency by eliminating dependency on centralized infrastructure while making it harder to stop.

💥 Support for Standard BIP 158 Block Filters 💻 Full Node Integration Rework 🔐 Create & Recover SLIP 39 Shares 💪 Nostr Update Manager

And more, check out the notes: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.6.0

🚨 New release 2.5.0 is here!

💪 3rd Party Providers for Fee & Exchange Rate 👨‍🔧 Quality of Life Features 📦 Backend and Coordinator packaged for Linux

This version continues to improve resiliency and makes some long-awaited improvements as a thank-you to our community!

https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.5.0

💪 3rd Party Providers for Fee & Exchange Rate

Wasabi now fetches the Fee Rate Estimations & Exchange Rate from configurable 3rd parties. This change is important as it's one of the last steps in our long-term mission of making Wasabi resistant to any event!

👨‍🔧 Quality of Life Features

To thank you for your incredible support, this release is packed with long-awaited improvements!

We’re grateful for your belief in Wasabi, whether shown by donating, contributing, or simply using the software.

Test it now and discover the updates!

📦 Backend and Coordinator packaged for Linux

The Debian package now includes two extra binaries: one for the backend (Wallet API) and one for the coordinator (Coinjoin API).

This makes it easier for community members to run a backend and/or a coordinator, private or publicly

Wasabi is slowly becoming a lightweight, easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet with amazing privacy features, not depending on any server.

There are few, if any, that compare in the ecosystem, and we are hard at work to make sure that Wasabi is undeniably the best of its kind.

🚨 New release 2.4.0 is here! 🚨

🤫 Send to Silent Payment addresses 🎁 Donation Button 🧪 Switch to TestNet 4 📝 Release Notes in the client

Full Release Notes & Download:

https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.4.0

🤫 Send to Silent Payment addresses

Silent Payments are addresses that you can privately reuse! Perfect for tips, donations, or recurring payments between the same entities.

Wasabi Wallet is among the first to support this cutting-edge feature. Receiving support is coming soon!

🎁 Donation Button

Wasabi Wallet is FOSS & relies on contributions for maintenance and improvements. You can now support contributors directly from the app with Silent Payments, showcasing this feature’s potential. We hope more Bitcoin projects adopt this funding strategy!

🧪 TestNet 4 Support

We’ve switched from TestNet 3 to TestNet 4! TestNet 4 resolves many of the issues plaguing its predecessor, offering a smoother testing experience. Don’t forget to grab new coins from a faucet!

📝 Release Notes in the client

Release Notes Highlights will now appear on the first launch after an update. You can still access the full release notes on GitHub for all the details.

Additional Note:

We’re excited to finally release the first part of Silent Payments, but more awesome features are on the way! We're also assessing potential privacy risks from sophisticated coordinator attacks and will publish a detailed statement soon, along with a plan of action if required.

🚨 Release 2.3.1 is out 🚨

This version is a stability release packed with bug fixes and preparatory changes for upcoming features

🪲 Bug Fixes
💫 Settings Layout ⤴️ Tor upgraded to v13.5.9
🚫 Buy Anything Button Disabled

Release notes & Download:

https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.3.1

🚨 New release 2.3.0.0 is out 🚨

🌐 Enhanced Tor integration 📊 Better BTC amount formatting 🔍 More insight on transactions 💰 [Beta] Payment in Coinjoin (RPC) 🔒 Trezor Safe 5 & ColdCard Q support

Release notes & Download: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.3.0.0

This release continues our vision of simplifying the codebase and improving the resiliency of the software, while still shipping long-awaited quality-of-life features. By building stronger foundations today, we're paving the way for more exciting features tomorrow!

🌐 Enhanced Tor integration

Complete rewrite of our Tor integration using standard HttpClient. Better performance, clearer code, and improved identity management for enhanced security.

📊 Better BTC amount formatting

Improved readability for all amounts with instant BTC-to-Sats conversion. Cleaner, more consistent UI across all screens showing amounts: balances, fees, Coinjoin outputs...

🔍 More insight on transactions

Detailed input/output lists for all transactions, including Coinjoins and transaction preview. This long-requested feature offers insight into the privacy-enhancing effects of coinjoins and the level of anonymity achieved with each transaction. Additionally, it is now visually clear how privacy suggestions improves transactions.

💰 [Beta] Payment in Coinjoin (RPC)

Our Payment in Coinjoin feature enters beta! Currently available via RPC only. Test it out and share your feedback!

Learn more: https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/using-wasabi/RPC.html#payincoinjoin

🔒 Hardware Wallet Updates Added support for Trezor Safe 5 & ColdCard Q with HWI 3.1.0 update.

We've redesigned our network isolation code (Tor integration)!

Originally, .NET lacked native support for routing HTTP traffic through Tor, so we built custom solutions. Over time, this became unsustainable, requiring us to manually implement many new low-level features like redirects and compression.

Now, with .NET 6’s native SOCKS proxy support, we've switched to a more efficient HttpClient. This simplifies our code, improves performance, and makes it easier to implement new features without headaches. It also improves clarity on how Tor integration works and drastically reduces the potential for errors.

Better building blocks are key to keep improving Wasabi!

How should BTC amounts be displayed? 🤔

In our next version (coming soon), we’re rolling out a fully redesigned amounts formatting throughout the wallet that we believe should set the industry standard.

It’s now much easier to read, no matter the screen or whether you’re dealing with small or large amounts. Plus, BTC/Sats conversions are instant. ⚡

v2.2.0.0 was a special one for Wasabi!

After countless hours revamping our procedure, this release was the first to be fully automatic 🤖

This is a major step forward, allowing us to ship new features and fixes much faster. Exciting times ahead 🚀

🚨 New release 2.2.0.0 is out 🚨

🥕 Taproot receive addresses 🚀 Faster transaction broadcasting 🔍 Help to setup and find a coordinator. ⏫ More accurate CPFP fee estimation 📉 Safer protocol 🪲 Backend optimizations

Release notes & Download: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.2.0.0

🥕 Taproot receive addresses

Users can now choose taproot when generating a new receiving address. Spending a taproot input is 16% cheaper compared to spending a native segwit input. Users aren’t the only ones that benefit - Bitcoin nodes can verify taproot’s signatures faster than legacy ones, so the entire network gets a little speed boost.

🚀 Faster transaction broadcasting

A more sophisticated transaction broadcasting mechanism was introduced to make the process faster. Transactions are now broadcast to multiple nodes in parallel (through the Tor network) and fail more quickly if the transaction is rejected by the network. Users who upgrade will notice it now takes half as long to send their coins.

🔍 Help to setup and find a coordinator

A new message is now shown when no coordinator is configured, along with some help to understand how to find and setup one.

⏫ More accurate CPFP fee estimation

The CPFP feature now takes into account the fee paid by the parent transaction. In previous releases, the child transaction assumed the parent paid 0 sats in fees, and thus always overpaid for the speed up.. This improvement will be especially significant in high-fee environments, where the CPFP feature is most useful!

📉 Safer protocol

In order to avoid introducing unknown incentives and to limit risk to users, the coordination fee concept has been removed. Only coinjoin coordinators that don't charge any coordination fee continue to be supported. Read more: https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/killing-coordination-fee/

🪲 Backend optimizations

Users who run a Wasabi backend can now do so with a pruned node and significant CPU/RAM savings. This makes hosting a backend much cheaper and helps to decentralize this component which Wasabi clients still depend on.

The cost of trustlessness and why we are killing the Coordination Fee concept

This article is the first in a series to be published on Nostr and our blog that aims to explain our decisions and trajectory by clearly presenting technical aspects of our implementation of a Bitcoin privacy preserving wallet and the WabiSabi Coinjoin Protocol.

Estimated reading time: ~10 minutes

Best read on a Markdown compatible client

Being trustless and privacy preserving

As Sjors Provoost notes in the introduction to Bitcoin: A Work in Progress, "keeping open-source software free of money-stealing bugs" is an exceedingly difficult task, especially when such software handles funds. Potential exploits in code are visible to all, as are patches awaiting deployment.

For Wasabi, the challenge extends further, as clients participating in coinjoin must follow a coordinator's lead—a third party whose code cannot be verified. We rarely break compatibility or force updates, meaning users on vulnerable versions will always exist if an exploit is discovered.

Wasabi has consistently been designed to empower clients against potential bad actors:

• Reproducible builds
• Minimal information transmitted to third parties (backend, coordinator, fee providers, etc.)
• "Smart client, Dumb backend" architecture

The complexity involved in building a trustless system is both underappreciated and staggering. Trustlessness invariably comes at the cost of user experience, and these suboptimal workflows must be carefully refined to remain competitive against privacy-degrading or trust-based alternatives.

A prime example of this trade-off is block filters. While alternative wallets allow users to see their balance instantly by connecting to an Electrum server or similar backend solution, how do you retain users when your software first requires them to download 2.6 GB of filters, then download each relevant (or false-positive) block using the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network? To lighten this problem, significant resources have been invested in refining our synchronization process to optimize and ensure the privacy gain is worthwhile for most users.

Clients still need to receive some information from the coordinator: round start times, phase durations, mining fee rates, etc. This information is used to compute the round ID, which clients then use to build and verify everything happening in the round. Two clients receiving different parameters therefore cannot participate in the same round, ensuring a malicious actor cannot mine information by selectively sending different round parameters.

Why the coordination fee concept is not a fit here

The coordination fee rate is a field provided by the coordinator and included in the round parameters. However, this field is unique, as it involves a non-standard agreement: the client must pay this fee only once (concept of free remixes). This is central to how the wallet functions: the client automatically participates in rounds until reaching a certain privacy threshold. If the rounds don't provide privacy, the client will continue to coinjoin indefinitely. Therefore a coordinator not offering free-remixes could create fast rounds not providing privacy and drain its users. We identified this problem, but the time it took to deploy a mitigation led to the only occurrence in our project’s history that some users funds have been exploited. For more details: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/discussions/13249

Free remixes are not the only "workaround" implemented in our client to improve the coordination fee system. Another crucial case for proper user experience is the "1-hop doesn't pay" rule. This means that if a payment is made using a coinjoin output and this payment produces change, the change doesn't incur another coordination fee. This rule is essential because clients don't control the size of their outputs. For instance, a user might receive only outputs of 1 BTC but need to make a payment of 0.1 BTC. The resulting change would not be private and would need to be remixed. Without the "1-hop doesn't pay" concept, this would result in paying the coordination fee again. Like free remixes, this rule is not enforced by the WabiSabi protocol. To be protected against coordinators that might not offer this "fee grace," clients would need to carefully select inputs for payments to minimize change value, sometimes at the cost of privacy.

In summary, the coordination fee relates to the implementation layer, and free remixes are not enforced by the WabiSabi CoinJoin Protocol. The protocol paper mentions it only as part of Wasabi's implementation. The client must trust the coordinator to allow its inputs into rounds indefinitely after the initial payment. A coordinator could decide against offering free remixes, in which case the client must trust it to produce rounds that provide substantial privacy, at least worth the cost.

In other words, the coordination fee concept involves an element of trust. It creates an incentive for the coordinator to act maliciously and forces the client to be highly discerning in recognizing when the coordinator might be attempting to extract more money than it should.

Resources could have been invested during the zkSNACKs era to build a guaranteed risk-free implementation of the coordination fee rate and free remixes concept. However, because the only coordinator used at the time belonged to the same entity funding client development, this type of development was not prioritized, as we knew this coordinator would not breach trust.

This is no longer the case, and the project's trajectory has changed significantly: resources are now extremely limited, and we prefer not to allocate precious developer hours to ensuring confidence in the coordination fee rate concept. Instead, we choose to allocate these resources to increasing software resilience, improving maintainability, and delivering impactful updates, such as the one coming in the next few days... stay tuned!

This Nostr key will be used by the Wasabi Wallet team to give updates on the project and provide some technical details.

Verify authenticity: NIP-05: [email protected] Github: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/ X: https://x.com/wasabiwallet/status/1835484240802157032 Website: Nostr icon on the left navbar