Samourai Wallet, the privacy-enhanced bitcoin wallet app, today announced the release and open sourcing of Samourai Dojo, the back end software infrastructure that sits on top of and augments a Bitcoin Core full node to power the privacy-focused bitcoin wallet.
“This is a huge milestone for us as we have been working towards this moment since we started Samourai in 2015; a huge win for the sovereignty of individual users; a win for bitcoin privacy; and a win for Open Source software.”
Up until now, users needed to trust Samourai servers with knowledge of their bitcoin public keys. With this release, users can now run and host their own Dojo server and bypass Samourai entirely. This is the most private way of using Samourai Wallet.
Who is it for?
Samourai Dojo is for anyone who wishes to use Samourai Wallet in the most private way possible. Using default Samourai Wallet gives access to the most advanced transactional privacy enhancing technologies available in any wallet on the market with features such as STONEWALL, STONEWALLx2, Stowaway, and soon Whirlpool, but the tradeoff is that users must trust Samourai servers with the knowledge their public keys.
Practically this means that even though third-party observers and blockchain analysis snoops won’t be as effective when trying to track Samourai users versus those of other wallets, the operators of Samourai Wallet theoretically can. Users running their own instance of Samourai Dojo and connecting it to their Samourai Wallet, will be getting the same transactional privacy tools without leaking any information to Samourai servers.
Dojo Functionality
- Provides unspent output lists to Samourai Wallet using users backing full node
- Provides fee rates to use from the local mempool.
- Mempool Orchestrator for time-delayed transactions (Staggered Ricochet)
- PushTX endpoint for broadcasting transactions through users backing full node
Support for tracking:
- XPUB (BIP44)
- YPUB (BIP49)
- ZPUB (BIP84)
- BIP47 loose addresses (P2PKH, Bech32)
- Loose addresses (P2PKH, P2SH, Bech32)
How to get it?
The Samourai team worked hard to create an experience that is friendly to users with minimal technical experience. Installation is simple with a single automated script that will create and set up a full Dojo back end composed of:
- a bitcoin full node accessible via an ephemeral Tor hidden service
- database for storing addresses and transactions of interest
- API accessible as a static Tor hidden service
- a maintenance tool accessible through a Tor web browser
Full detailed instructions for installing Dojo using this method can be found on the Samourai Dojo Github repository.
Hardware
Users who’d rather have a plug and play experience, will be provided this opportunity, as Samourai announced it has partnered with Bitseed to provide top of the line hardware preloaded with Samourai Dojo. The Samourai team is finalizing the production of these high quality dedicated full nodes and they will be available for sale very soon.
Future Plans
The Samourai team is now working steadily on finishing Samourai Wallet to full release 1.0. There remains one final update before Samourai Wallet is ready for a full release, which is the ability for a user to pair their wallet to their Samourai Dojo, and this should be ready to go this week.
“From our humble beginnings in 2015 as two passionate privacy activists working away on Samourai on nights and weekends at seedy London pubs we have promised two things: 1. Samourai will open source our back end servers allowing users to bypass our infrastructure entirely. 2. Samourai will remain in “unreleased” Alpha status until we do so. As an equally humble group of 6 privacy activists remotely working from seedy pubs around the world we have delivered on promise one.”
