TL;DR: Cryptocurrency wallet Electron Cash released version 4.0.0 on 27 March 2019, integrating enhanced privacy software, CashShuffle. “It is an optional plugin for shuffling coins securely with other users,” according to the wallet’s GitHub, allowing a level of relative transaction anonymity for bitcoin cash (BCH) previously unknown. Fungibility is considered by many ecosystem observers to be critical next step in cryptocurrency adoption. CoinSpice caught up with developer Jonald Fyookball to get a better sense of the innovation’s importance.

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Bitcoin Cash Gets Enhanced Privacy: CashShuffle Integrated into Electron Cash

What you do with your money is your business, and that appears to be the underlying ethos of two projects involved with Bitcoin Cash, Electron Wallet and CashShuffle. BCH is thought to be an answer to the kind of autonomy traditional cash brings with fiat or government money. The difference, of course, is BCH isn’t issued by a central bank, politicians have no say, and it is increasingly easier to use and spend. No banks, no high fees. You get the idea.

Privacy is an aspect of cash very difficult to mimic or reproduce in the digital world, however. And while plenty of efforts have been tried, they’re either mostly hype or way too difficult for the average user to experience. Electron Wallet and CashShuffle might have a solution.

“Huge thanks to many people in the community who helped make this possible,” developer Jonald Fyookball posted to popular subreddit r/btc about CashShuffle’s strong integration into the Electron Wallet, “especially the developers and those that helped pay for the security audit.” That audit was recently completed by Kudelski, a well-respected industry leader, and served to be one of the last big hurdles prior to release.

Practical, User Friendly

The Electron Wallet GitHub was similarly excited, “Once again thanks and congrats to the entire BCH community on this huge milestone. As usual, only download from https://electroncash.org and verify the checksum before running.” It credited “the bulk of the work for this release has been this feature” to devs such as “Clifford, cculianu, Josh [Ellithorpe], Mark Lundeberg, Jonald Fyookball, imaginaryusername, emergent_reasons, acidsploit, and others.”

Famed BCH evangelist and investor Roger Ver commented on Fyookball’s announcement, “I was so excited for this release that I couldn’t fall asleep tonight! It’s finally here! Thank you Jonald!” And, indeed, Fyookball describes how “integrating into wallets is critical,” to CoinSpice in an interview minutes after the formal release. “CashShuffle isn’t based on any changes to the base BCH protocol, so it lives entirely at the wallet layer,” Fyookball insisted.

For he and the developer team, it’s been a long road. “We’ve been working on it for over a year,” Fyookball explained. “The project has gone through many phases, from research, to prototyping with an optional plugin, to integrating into the wallet, complete with a security audit.”

Better Privacy

“CashShuffle is a practical application of CoinJoin,” Fyookball noted. “Of course it doesn’t offer everything that, say, Monero does. However, we are focused on making it very user friendly. If it’s not easy to use, its worthless for the average user. And by doing this, we hope to create a big anonymity set which might actually offer better privacy than some other solutions.”

Electron Cash Wallet’s latest version can be downloaded for free under an MIT License, and is available across most platforms: Windows 4.0.0 EXE, OSX Mac OSX .dmg, Linux, Android 3.3.5-1 APK file, and iOS. CashShuffle has a sleek new website which is also geared toward user ease and friendliness.

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