Samourai & Wasabi cease operating coordinators

The DOJ brought a case against some of the Samourai team and siezed their domain. Wasabi’s ZKSnacks voluntarily shut down coordinator activities.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/founders-and-ceo-cryptocurrency-mixing-service-arrested-and-charged-money-laundering

https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/zksnacks-is-discontinuing-its-coinjoin-coordination-service-1st-of-june/

https://www.coincenter.org/dojs-new-stance-on-crypto-wallets-is-a-threat-to-liberty-and-the-rule-of-law/

JoinMarket

JoinMarket is a P2P coinjoin system, where users select coinjoin counterparties from a list of offers.

https://github.com/joinmarket-webui/jam

https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver

Mining landscape post-halving

https://data.hashrateindex.com/network-data/btc

https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/block-sizes-weights#1m

https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/hashrate-difficulty

https://data.hashrateindex.com/stock-index

https://cryptoslate.com/mining-firm-stronghold-considering-sale-of-company-in-latest-financial-report/

Great Script Restoration Project

Rusty Russel has a strategy for restoring many opcodes that were disabled early in bitcoin’s history due to DoS fears.

https://github.com/rustyrussell/bips/commit/c2f268e83031b9b67e798c5c72a1171bfc463d1f

btc++ conference talk

Bitcoin core 27.0

• BIP324 encrypted transport on by default
• Opt-in V3 transaction relay rules

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-27.0.md

Ransomware

Following LE actions, one ransomware-as-a-service platform has exit scammed, others have selectively broken agreements with users. Both median and average ransom payments are trending up. However, average ransom payment is down 32% from Q4 2023.

https://www.coveware.com/blog/2024/4/17/raas-devs-hurt-their-credibility-by-cheating-affiliates-in-q1-2024