By EZ in Releases — Mar 21, 2024

Whack-A-Mole: Samourai Launches Stage 1 of Whirlpool Decentralization

"We're pleased to announce the first step in decentralizing Whirlpool coinjoin is now live. We have launched simultaneous updates for Samourai Wallet, Whirlpool GUI/CLI, and Dojo - update your clients today to begin making use of decentralized Whirlpool!"

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"Going forward Whirlpool client and Whirlpool Coordinator communication is now well on the road to being purely decentralized, running over Soroban; the app agnostic Tor based communication protocol," announced Samourai in a blog post.

"We encourage you to update to the latest software releases as soon as possible as to not cause you any inconvenience."

"As of today there is no longer a single hard coded Coordinator server that your mixing clients are looking for, instead Coordinator server discovery is automatic through the encrypted Soroban network. This means that even if a Coordinator goes offline unexpectedly, downtime and disruption will be minimal as clients use the Soroban network to find a replacement Coordinator server. We call this first stage of decentralization "Whack-A-Mole."

"This is only the first stage in our decentralization strategy. The next stage involves multiple coordinators working together."
"Creating and broadcasting Tx0's and mixing/remixing remains the same workflow. For the more advanced users you will notice a change to the Whirlpool CLI logs where you can observe your client communicating over Soroban."

"We developed Soroban years ago to allow for secure encrypted communication between individual wallets for composing collaborative transactions such as STONEWALLx2 and Stowaway. Now Soroban is also being used to facilitate encrypted communications between clients and coordinator.."

"In the coming weeks more information and guides will be released to help you run your own Soroban nodes to help ensure the robustness of the decentralized Whirlpool coordination communication."
"Join our Telegram and Follow Us on Twitter to keep up to date on development and to receive help from the very helpful community."

What's new

All users are invited to update their Samourai software to the latest Whirlpool client version, including:

Samourai Wallet 0.99.98i_dexwp
Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1 [standalone]
Whirlpool GUI 0.10.5 [inc. Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1 for standalone mode]
Dojo 1.24.1 [inc. Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1]

"Older Whirlpool client versions will be able to continue to create Tx0’s, mix and remix, however once we observe internally that the number of the connected Whirlpool clients running over Soroban surpasses those running an older non-Soroban Whirlpool client, we plan to decommission the centralized Whirlpool coordinator."