Share this page!

LaurentMT Profile picture
Twitter logo
Feb 22 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
An article published this morning by @laurashin has raised a lot of questions about the ability of Chainalysis to "de-mix" Wasabi Wallet transactions.
Good news: It appears that Laura's book contains a reference to the transaction sending 50BTC to Wasabi Wallet (thanks @raw_avocado for the info).
Let's see if this info teach us something about the method used by Chainalysis to "de-mix" Wasabi's coinjoin transactions and if it exploits an issue with the mixer or just a "user error" ?
Preamble: I'm not going to explain here how Wasabi Wallet works in details but you just need to know that when a large amount enters the mixer, it's "peeled" through several transactions and it's often possible to follow this peelchain.
In this case, following the peelchain lead us to an interesting output of 25.01209393BTC.
The specificity of this output is that it's associated to address [bc1qxp8k4] that was used twice by Wasabi Wallet (i.e. it was used in 2 mixes).

Note: Such random occurrences of addresses reused by the mixer are a known issue of the wallet.
oxt.me/address/tiid/2…
We can observe that the second UTXO managed by this address is a mixed output of 0.40156916BTC that was later consolidated with 5 others mixed outputs.
oxt.me/transaction/ti…
The consolidated amount (1.40546680BTC) was then sent to 1HGDHX6uKD3AGRsHFU4L4Y3Bs3k6GpirLz, an address controlled by Poloniex. #Bingo
oxt.me/transaction/ec…
From there we may gather more evidences by noticing that 9 deposits were made to this Poloniex address or by analyzing the cluster associated to [bc1qxp8k]. But this thread is already too long and we've answered our original question...
oxt.me/entity/tiid/24…
To summarize:
- In this case, no error was made by the user. Only mixed outputs were consolidated in small numbers (good practice),
- Chainalysis has exploited a known issue of the mixer,
- No "advanced tool" was needed to find these results.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with LaurentMT

LaurentMT Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @LaurentMT

LaurentMT Profile picture
May 24, 2020
This week, the movement of 50 old bitcoins has received a lot of attention. Meanwhile, @ziggamon was staring at the mempool...
A short discussion with him convinced me to check the case. That seemed like an easy one. God, I didn't know the monster that he was observing.
First step was to get a better picture of what was happening by clustering the addresses of this entity. To date, more than 2.3 millions of addresses have been identified but this figure is a lower bound. I suspect the real number may be as high as 4 millions of addresses. Image
Read 14 tweets
LaurentMT Profile picture
Aug 2, 2019
On-chain mixing - A few thoughts about the challenges created by heterogeneous participants, postmix behaviors and statistical analysis. #SorryForTheLongThread
Disclaimer: It's well known (and repeated) that 2 important challenges for on-chain mixers are sybil attacks by malicious actors and the need for a large anonymity set. So, they won't be the subject of this thread.
Let's just note that it's not always easy to measure the exact size of the anonymity set. Thus, liquidities entering the mixer are sometimes used as a proxy metrics for the kind of anonymity set that you may expect from the mixer...
Read 30 tweets
LaurentMT Profile picture
Feb 25, 2019
Time for a little story #BitcoinTales
An ancient legend (ok, it isn't really ancient considering that I just invented it) says that a giant white whale lives in the depths of the Bitcoin blockchain. If you're able to find it and if you feed it with "dirty" coins, it will give you "clean" coins.
Obviously, this superstition doesn't make a lot of sense considering that the concept of "dirty" coins itself doesn't make any sense. Well, people like fairy tales.
Read 13 tweets
LaurentMT Profile picture
Nov 29, 2018
A few random thoughts about the recent announcement of Bitcoin addresses entering the OFAC list of sanctioned parties.
An obvious question here is: What does it mean when we say "nobody is permitted to engage in any transaction with one these addresses" ?
First answer: you shouldn't accept a transaction sending bitcoins to you if some of the utxos spent by this transaction are "related" to one these addresses.
Read 17 tweets
LaurentMT Profile picture
Mar 31, 2018
For some reasons, this announcement is somewhat special for me ("disclosure" included in the thread).
In early 2016, while I was looking for fundings, the team of what would later become CypherTrace, contacted me for the acquisition of OXT.
Since I've always envisioned OXT as a public source of information, I proposed a different model with a license allowing CT to run their own private version of OXT.
Read 10 tweets
LaurentMT Profile picture
Dec 20, 2017
Managing the fragmentation of their utxo set will become a critical factor for BTC services.
For example, this entity (oxt.me/entity/tiid/48…) is a wallet controlled by Coinbase. To date, it owns around 203 BTC split in 1,464,545 utxos !
With BTC at $15.8k, it means $3.2M with an average utxo value of 2.2$. #DustInTheChain
This fragmentation is the result of 2 factors: a real business success and a long failure at optimizing their processes (batch transfers, etc).
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @LaurentMT has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @LaurentMT!

Read all threads by @LaurentMT

:(