Paper 2022/285

Usability of Cryptocurrency Wallets Providing CoinJoin Transactions

Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila, and Edgar Weippl

Abstract

Over the past years, the interest in Blockchain technology and its applications has tremendously increased. This increase of interest was however accompanied by serious threats that raised concerns over user data privacy. Prominent examples include transaction traceability and identification of senders, receivers, and transaction amounts. This resulted in a multitude of privacy-preserving techniques that offer different guarantees in terms of trust, decentralization, and traceability. CoinJoin \cite{maxwell2013coinjoin} is one of the promising techniques that adopts a decentralized approach to achieve privacy on the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) based blockchain. Despite the advantages of such a technique in obfuscating user transaction data, making them usable to common users requires considerable development and integration efforts. This paper provides a comprehensive usability study of three main Bitcoin wallets that integrate the CoinJoin technique, i.e., Joinmarket, Wasabi, and Samourai. A cognitive walkthrough was conducted in order to evaluate the ease of use of these wallets using usability and fundamental design criteria. The study findings will enable privacy wallet developers to gain valuable insights into a better user experience.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
blockchainprivacyBitcoinmixingusabilitywalletscoinjoincryptocurrencyanonymity
Contact author(s)
ghesmati @ icloud com
History
2022-04-18: revised
2022-03-07: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/285
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/285,
      author = {Simin Ghesmati and Walid Fdhila and Edgar Weippl},
      title = {Usability of Cryptocurrency Wallets Providing CoinJoin Transactions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/285},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/285}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/285}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.