Impleum team released the testnet alpha of the Privacy Wallet, a decentralized, in-wallet privacy solution for Bitcoin. It is an implementation of TumbleBit, a privacy protocol which uses a trustless tumbler that cannot steal BTC and cannot undermine the anonymity of the parties involved.

The Privacy Wallet uses an Impleum Masternode server to provide users with a very high anonymity set (and, therefore, privacy with regards to their activity) and to make BTC fungible.

In building the Privacy Wallet, Impleum have made a resounding commitment to improving the cryptocurrency space.

Privacy wallet

Very high degree of anonymity, determined by the number of participants in each tumbling cycle Cycle time of 117 blocks, or 19.5 hours Tumbling fee of 1.55%, plus the standard network fee chosen by the user

Privacy Wallet: Decentralized TumbleBit

Tumbling is hard to perform successfully. Coordinating that many people and ensuring they follow the process correctly requires a sophisticated service.

Privacy is open-source, so anyone who wishes to do so can audit the code to verify that it is safe and does what it says on the tin. It makes the tumbling process as easy as possible by providing the service fully in-wallet: download the wallet, follow the setup process and you can be tumbling your BTC in no time.

The real kicker is that Privacy Wallet is decentralized. The tumbling itself is performed by Impleum Masternodes.

When you select to start a tumbling cycle, Privacy Wallet will broadcast the attempt to connect to the tumbling Masternode server and it will establish which Masternodes meet the requirements (denomination – how much BTC you want to tumble, elected fee, collateral, etc.) and then randomly chooses a valid Masternode to perform that tumbling cycle.

This means that there cannot be collusion between the tumbling participants and the Tumbler.

Each cycle provides the participants with an anonymity set equal to the number of participants. If 99 people are tumbling with you, you’ll have an anonymity set of 100. This is beyond what is achievable with most privacy solutions for Bitcoin and also better than other altcoin solutions (for example, Monero achieves an anonymity set of between 2 and 10).

Looking Forward: Privacy, Scaling and Impleum

At the moment, the Privacy Wallet is a multi-chain wallet that lets a user hold both BTC and IMPL, but only allows them to tumble BTC. Impleum Team are working on support for IMPL tumbling as well, which will bring the tumbling cycle time down to just around 2 hours, rather than BTC’s 19.5 hours.

The Privacy Wallet is an implementation of NTumblebit, a C# implementation of of TumbleBit.

As things stand, the Privacy Wallet supports the Classic Tumbler Mode of TumbleBit; however, work is being done to support the Payment Hub Mode also. The Payment Hub Mode works with just two on-chain transactions and then introduces anonymity through a series of off-chain payments (similar to the Lightning Network). This also facilitates significant scaling potential for Bitcoin itself.

These are early days, but TumbleBit has what it takes to make big waves in the Bitcoin scaling debate.

Enhancements made to both the Privacy Wallet interface and the Masternode Client Discovery Protocol have also been incorporated into our public Testnet release.

Download the Privacy wallet with Impleum Privacy Protocol (Testnet) from the link below. The wallet will then automatically discover and connect to an available Testnet Masternode.

Download

Packages are available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Download for Windows 64-bit

Download for Windows 32-bit

Download for Mac OS X

Download for Ubuntu