CoinJoin is a way for several people to build one Bitcoin transaction together, so that someone watching the blockchain can’t tell which of the equal outputs belongs to whom, unless a dishonest coordinator, one party posing as many, or careless spending afterwards gives it away. Nobody ever hands over their coins. This guide shows how a round works, which tools still run it as of November 2026, what can go wrong, and what to do after you mix, which matters as much as the mix itself.
Update (November 2026): The idea behind CoinJoin has not changed, but the tools have. US authorities seized Samourai Wallet’s Whirlpool coordinator in April 2024, and Sparrow Wallet removed its Whirlpool client in version 1.9.0, so the “Mix Selected” workflow this guide once described is gone. zkSNACKs switched off Wasabi’s original coordinator on 1 June 2024. The original JoinMarket software was archived in April 2026, and its page now says “DO NOT USE THIS CODE”: it has vulnerabilities that will not be fixed, and in every release from v0.7.0 to v0.9.12, sending a PayJoin with it can lose the full value of the coins you spend.
As of November 2026, the CoinJoin tools that still work are Wasabi with an independent coordinator, Ginger Wallet, Ashigaru’s relaunched Whirlpool (with real trade-offs), and JoinMarket NG, an independent reimplementation of the JoinMarket protocol on which the Jam 2.0 web interface (still in beta) now runs. PayJoin is alive in other wallets. Sparrow is still a good wallet for coin control and labels; only its Whirlpool feature is gone. Our lesson CoinJoin in 2026: How Bitcoin Mixing Works and What Still Operates After Whirlpool compares these tools side by side.
How CoinJoin Works
At its core, CoinJoin is a collaborative transaction protocol where multiple participants combine their Bitcoin inputs into a single transaction with multiple outputs. The fundamental principle relies on transaction input-output unlinkability: when several users contribute inputs of equal denomination and receive outputs of the same size, external observers cannot determine which input funded which output.
The process works because Bitcoin transactions natively support multiple inputs and outputs. A standard CoinJoin transaction might include inputs from five different users, each contributing 0.01 BTC, and produce five outputs of 0.01 BTC going to fresh addresses controlled by each participant. From the blockchain’s perspective, this is a single valid transaction — but the connection between specific inputs and outputs becomes probabilistically uncertain. Outsiders can usually still tell that a transaction is a CoinJoin, because a row of equal outputs stands out; what they can’t tell is which output is whose.
Crucially, CoinJoin never requires participants to surrender custody of their funds. Each participant’s wallet checks that its own output is in the transaction, for the right amount, and only then signs its own inputs; if anything is wrong, it refuses and the coin stays where it was. No single coordinator can redirect or steal funds, making CoinJoin fundamentally different from custodial mixing services.
Major CoinJoin Implementations
Wasabi and Ginger (WabiSabi)
Wasabi Wallet uses WabiSabi, a round design in which a coordinator (a server that gathers participants and assembles the transaction) builds large CoinJoins where each person can put in and take out different amounts. Its original coordinator, run by the company zkSNACKs, shut down on 1 June 2024. The wallet still works: you now choose an independent coordinator yourself and paste its address in Settings, under the Coordinator tab.
Current Wasabi versions only join rounds where you pay the mining fee for your share of the transaction and no coordinator fee. In rare cases a leftover of at most 10,000 sats (100 million sats make one bitcoin) per CoinJoin goes to the coordinator, instead of becoming a tiny change output that would hurt your privacy. Tor, a network that hides your IP address, is on by default.
Ginger Wallet is a fork of Wasabi that comes set up with its own coordinator. That is simpler, but you accept its operator’s fees, rules and view of your rounds. As of November 2026 it charges a 0.3% coordinator fee on coins above 0.03 BTC (coins of 0.03 BTC or less, and remixes, are free) plus mining fees, and its service is not available to US nationals or to anyone located in the US or its territories.
Whirlpool (historical, plus the Ashigaru relaunch)
Whirlpool, built by Samourai Wallet, implemented the ZeroLink design: every round mixed coins of exactly the same size, in a few fixed pools, so all its outputs looked alike. It used blinded signatures, designed so that the coordinator would not learn which output belonged to which input. Coins entered a pool through a first transaction called Tx0, which paid a one-time pool fee; after that, remixing was free.
The free remix model was particularly powerful — once Bitcoin entered a Whirlpool pool, it could continue mixing in subsequent rounds at no additional cost, progressively increasing its anonymity set, which created strong incentives to leave funds in the pool and improved liquidity for everyone.
Samourai’s coordinator was seized by US authorities in April 2024 and no longer operates, and Sparrow removed its Whirlpool client in version 1.9.0. Never download old Samourai or Whirlpool software or visit old Samourai domains: abandoned infrastructure is a malware risk.
In June 2025 Ashigaru, an independent project, revived the Whirlpool design on new infrastructure, with its own coordinator reached only over Tor. As of November 2026 it runs two fixed pools, 0.025 BTC and 0.25 BTC. Each entry (one Tx0) costs 5% of the pool size, 125,000 or 1,250,000 sats, plus mining fees, and remixes are free. The honest trade-off: it is again a single coordinator, the same weak point that ended Samourai, and its fee is high next to Wasabi coordinators that charge none. Download it only from ashigaru.rs and verify the signature before installing.
JoinMarket (now through JoinMarket NG)
JoinMarket takes a market-based approach. “Makers” leave coins available for CoinJoins and earn a small fee each time they are used; “takers” pay makers to build a CoinJoin when they need one. This creates a natural incentive structure: makers get paid for coins that would otherwise sit idle, and takers pay for a CoinJoin on demand.
There is no central coordinator. Participants find each other through directory servers, meeting points where makers post their offers, then exchange the transaction details in encrypted messages, and the taker builds the transaction. No single server can stop every round, but the taker learns which outputs belong to which maker: takers get the stronger privacy, and makers trade a little of theirs for income. Setup is more technical than in Wasabi, which is the price of removing the coordinator.
The original JoinMarket software, joinmarket-clientserver, must no longer be used. Its maintainers announced on 27 April 2026 that it is archived (its last release was v0.9.12), and its page now says “DO NOT USE THIS CODE”: it has vulnerabilities that have not been and will not be patched. The worst involves PayJoin (explained below). In every release from v0.7.0 to v0.9.12, when you send a PayJoin, a malicious receiver can redirect the full value of the coins you spend, not just the payment. The flaw is in sending, and payments that already confirmed as expected were not affected.
The maintained way into the same market is JoinMarket NG, an independent reimplementation of the JoinMarket protocol; the archived project names no successor. It speaks the same network protocol as the original software, so it trades with the same makers. It runs against your own Bitcoin Core node or a lighter backend called Neutrino, and its main interface is the command line. Jam, a separate web interface, now runs on JoinMarket NG; Jam 2.0 is still in beta. If you still have an old JoinMarket wallet, follow JoinMarket NG’s wallet recovery guide. JoinMarket NG can’t open the old wallet file, so you import the wallet’s recovery words instead (plus its passphrase, if you set one). Keep the old files as well: the recovery words don’t bring back your labels.
PayJoin (P2EP)
PayJoin, also called Pay-to-Endpoint, represents a distinct approach where a CoinJoin transaction is disguised as a normal payment. In a PayJoin, both the sender and recipient contribute inputs to the transaction, breaking the common-input-ownership heuristic that chain analysis relies on (the assumption that all of a transaction’s inputs belong to one person). Because PayJoin transactions look like ordinary payments on the blockchain, they provide privacy benefits that don’t draw attention — and they improve the privacy of the broader network by making the common-input heuristic less reliable.
There are two versions. The original, BIP 78, needs the person being paid to run a server that stays online, so it is mostly used by shops: BTCPay Server, payment software that merchants run themselves, can receive PayJoins, and Sparrow can send one when the payment link or QR code offers it. The newer BIP 77 (still a draft as of November 2026) lets an ordinary wallet receive without running a server: the two wallets exchange encrypted messages through a relay that can’t read them, and they don’t need to be online at the same time. The JoinMarket flaw above belongs to that one program’s sending code, not to PayJoin itself, so the rule is simple: never send a PayJoin with the original JoinMarket.
The Privacy Mechanics: Anonymity Sets and Forward Privacy
The effectiveness of CoinJoin is measured through anonymity sets: the number of equal outputs your output could be, from an outsider’s point of view. A Whirlpool round with five participants gives each output an anonymity set of 5. Remixing helps, but the numbers don’t simply multiply: if you meet the same coins again you gain little, and if one surveillance firm supplies many of the coins in a round (one party posing as many, called a Sybil attack), your real crowd is smaller than it looks. JoinMarket NG’s own guidance puts it plainly: “Neither a round count nor a larger number of equal outputs guarantees anonymity.”
Forward privacy is a critical concept: CoinJoin breaks the direct on-chain link at the point of the mix. Even if past transactions become deanonymized, the mixing event makes forward tracing much harder: someone following your coin into the mix can narrow its output down only to the crowd of equal outputs, as long as you spend carefully afterwards and that crowd is made of real, separate participants. This is particularly valuable for KYC-sourced Bitcoin, where the acquisition point is already known but future spending privacy can be improved.
However, forward privacy has limitations. The initial acquisition through KYC channels remains permanently documented regardless of subsequent mixing. CoinJoin provides meaningful forward privacy but cannot retroactively erase the initial identity link.
Risks and Challenges
Toxic Change
Equal outputs need equal amounts, and your coin rarely matches exactly. The remainder comes back to you as change that is directly linkable to the original input. In fixed-pool tools such as Whirlpool it is easy to spot, which is why it is called “toxic change” (Ashigaru keeps it in a separate account called Badbank). Wasabi’s varied amounts leave little or none, and a JoinMarket taker can avoid change by sweeping a whole mixdepth (one of JoinMarket’s separate wallet compartments), at the cost of linking every coin the sweep spends. Proper handling of toxic change — either through additional mixing rounds, spending to unrelated services, or careful management of your UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs, the separate coins in your wallet) — is essential for maintaining privacy gains.
Post-Mix Behavior
The privacy benefits of CoinJoin can be entirely negated by careless post-mix behavior. Consolidating mixed outputs, sending to addresses associated with known identities, or creating obvious spending patterns can re-link mixed UTXOs to their original owners. Post-mix discipline is arguably as important as the mixing itself.
Coordinator Risk
Coordinator-based tools (Wasabi, Ginger and Ashigaru) depend on a server. Because your wallet checks the transaction before signing, a coordinator can’t take your coins. It can stop rounds, as happened to Samourai and zkSNACKs in 2024, and it may learn which outputs are yours: in December 2024, developer Yuval Kogman described on the bitcoin-dev mailing list how a dishonest coordinator can trick Wasabi-family clients and the Whirlpool design into revealing those links, for example by quietly giving each user a round of their own. Some coordinators also screen coins or exclude whole countries.
We have not found confirmation that these attacks are fully closed in current clients. So choose coordinators run by people with a public reputation, keep your client updated for its general security fixes, and treat no coordinator as a guarantee. JoinMarket has no coordinator to trust, but the taker who builds each transaction learns which outputs belong to the makers.
Regulatory Pressure
The best-known case targeted the people running a coordination service. Samourai’s founders were charged in April 2024 with money-laundering conspiracy and with running an unlicensed money-transmitting business; in July 2025 they pleaded guilty to the money-transmitting count only, and in November 2025 they were sentenced to five and four years in prison. Weeks after the Samourai seizure, zkSNACKs shut down Wasabi’s coordinator.
As an individual user, the risk you are most likely to meet is an exchange questioning, freezing or refusing coins with CoinJoin history. Rules differ by country, so check yours. This pressure has pushed development toward tools with no central coordinator, like JoinMarket, and toward independent coordinators that anyone can run.
The Post-Coordinator Era
Within about six weeks in 2024, the two largest coordinators disappeared: US authorities seized Samourai’s Whirlpool coordinator in April, and zkSNACKs switched off the coordinator behind Wasabi on 1 June. Both events sharpened a lesson the space already understood: any coordinator, however well designed its blind signing, is a single point of failure that authorities can reach.
CoinJoin did not end; it spread out. As of November 2026, Wasabi users pick from independent coordinators, Ginger Wallet runs its own, Ashigaru relaunched Whirlpool under a new coordinator with the same structural risk, and JoinMarket’s coordinator-free market lives on through JoinMarket NG now that the original software is archived. PayJoin (BIP 78 and BIP 77) needs no coordinator at all because it rides inside ordinary payments. Coordinator-free tools still face practical limits: a CoinJoin needs enough participants with compatible amounts at the same moment, which is exactly why JoinMarket pays makers to keep coins available.
Best Practices for CoinJoin Usage
Choose a pool that fits (fixed-pool mixing): If you use a fixed-pool tool such as Ashigaru’s Whirlpool (0.025 or 0.25 BTC as of November 2026), pick the pool that fits the payments you expect to make. The entry fee is 5% of the pool size, so the bigger pool costs more per entry. Wasabi has no fixed pools: each person can put in and take out different amounts. With JoinMarket NG you choose the amount, and as a taker you see the makers it picked and their fees before you confirm. PayJoin has no pool concept at all.
Give remixing time, without counting on a number: More rounds with different participants make your output harder to trace, but no round count guarantees privacy. Leave the client running so your coins remix, and wait before spending: spending minutes after a mix makes timing analysis easier.
Maintain post-mix discipline: Never consolidate mixed outputs. Spend them individually to separate destinations. Avoid sending mixed Bitcoin directly to services that know your identity.
Handle toxic change carefully: Don’t combine toxic change with mixed outputs. Consider it as a separate UTXO category requiring its own privacy treatment.
Use dedicated infrastructure: Connect through Tor and use your own Bitcoin node when participating in CoinJoin. This hides your IP address from the services you connect to and keeps your wallet from telling someone else’s server which addresses are yours, though an observer who can watch both ends of a connection can still match the timing.
Looking Forward
The evolution of CoinJoin technology continues along multiple fronts. Cross-implementation compatibility could dramatically increase anonymity sets by unifying liquidity across different CoinJoin protocols. Advances in cryptographic techniques may enable more efficient coordination mechanisms, while improvements in user interfaces are making privacy tools accessible to non-technical users.
The fundamental value proposition remains: CoinJoin provides meaningful transaction privacy within Bitcoin’s existing protocol rules, without requiring changes to the base layer. As surveillance capabilities advance, the importance of accessible, robust mixing tools will only increase.
Step-by-Step Guide
Performing a CoinJoin requires careful preparation, so the mix succeeds and the privacy survives afterwards. Sparrow’s old “Mix Selected” (Whirlpool) button is gone, so the steps below use tools that work in November 2026. Each mixing tool has its own wallet, and you mix inside that tool; Sparrow stays useful for coin control and labels in your other wallets.
Run your own node and use Tor. A wallet that asks someone else’s server about your addresses tells that server which coins are yours, and connecting without Tor exposes your IP address. JoinMarket NG runs against your own Bitcoin Core node (or the lighter Neutrino backend). Ashigaru Terminal connects to public Electrum servers over Tor unless you enter your own Electrum server (a program that serves your node’s data to wallets) in its preferences. A private node is the foundation of any mixing setup, whichever tool you choose.
Pick your tool and download it only from the project’s official site, then check its signature before installing. Our lesson on verifying Bitcoin software shows how.
Create a new wallet specifically for mixing. Do not use an existing wallet that has transaction history tied to your identity. Generate a fresh seed phrase, write it down on paper or stamp it into metal, and store it securely. Treat it as a hot wallet: the keys sit on the computer that signs each round (Wasabi can’t CoinJoin from a hardware wallet, and JoinMarket NG tells makers to treat their online computer as a hot wallet), so only put in amounts you would keep in a hot wallet. A separate wallet also keeps the coins you mix apart from your everyday coins.
Send Bitcoin to the new wallet. Transfer the amount you want to mix from your existing wallet. Wait for at least one confirmation before proceeding, and label the coin by where it came from (for example “KYC”). Note that this transfer itself creates a blockchain link between your old wallet and the privacy wallet — this is the exact link that CoinJoin will break going forward.
Choose your mixing path.
Wasabi with an independent coordinator: In Settings, open the Coordinator tab, paste the address of a coordinator you have chosen, and restart Wasabi. Wasabi’s documentation lists ways to find one, such as announcements over Nostr and community statistics sites, which it asks you to use with caution. Then start coinjoining; Wasabi keeps remixing your coins until they reach the anonymity score target in its settings. You pay mining fees and, at most, a 10,000-sat leftover per round.
Ginger Wallet: Ginger comes with its coordinator already set. You accept its fee (0.3% on coins above 0.03 BTC as of November 2026), its rules and its view of your rounds, and it is not available to US nationals or to anyone located in the US or its territories.
JoinMarket NG (no coordinator): Follow JoinMarket NG’s own Get started guide and its Run a CoinJoin guide. They cover installing it, connecting your node and Tor, creating a wallet, and running a CoinJoin as a taker, where you review the makers and fees before you confirm. Start with an amount you can afford to risk. If you prefer a browser interface, Jam 2.0 runs on JoinMarket NG but is still in beta. If your node’s app store offers “JoinMarket” or “Jam”, check which backend it installs: the original JoinMarket must not be used. As a maker you earn fees by offering your coins instead, from a computer that stays online with its keys.
Ashigaru Whirlpool (relaunched, with trade-offs): Mix with Ashigaru Terminal, downloaded from ashigaru.rs and verified. Its Tx0 splits your coin into pool-sized pieces (0.025 or 0.25 BTC) and pays the 5% entry fee, and the unmixed change goes to its separate Badbank account. It restores the equal-amount pool model, but it is again a single coordinator, the same structural risk that ended Samourai, and the fee is high. Use it only if you accept that trade-off.
PayJoin: If your goal is privacy on one real payment rather than a mixing session, pay with PayJoin. BTCPay Server can receive BIP 78 PayJoins, and Sparrow can send one when the payment link or QR code offers it. Both sender and recipient contribute inputs, so the transaction looks like an ordinary payment while breaking the common-input-ownership heuristic. There is no coordinator and no pool. Never send a PayJoin with the original JoinMarket software.
Manage any change and toxic outputs. Whichever tool you use, label change that is still linked to your input and keep it apart: Ashigaru puts it in Badbank, Wasabi leaves little, and a JoinMarket taker gets change unless they sweep a whole mixdepth, which links every coin it spends. Re-enter toxic change into a pool if it is big enough, spend it on its own to an unrelated destination, or accept the small leak for low-value change. Never spend it together with mixed coins.
Spend mixed UTXOs individually. When you make a payment from mixed funds, choose by hand which coin pays (coin control: Wasabi calls it Manual Control, and JoinMarket NG has a --select-utxos option) and spend a single mixed UTXO. Never combine multiple mixed outputs in one transaction, as this links them and reveals common ownership. If the UTXO value exceeds your payment amount, the change goes to a new address in your wallet, and the person you pay can see it; label it as a coin they know about.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Combining mixed and unmixed UTXOs in one transaction. This is the single most common CoinJoin mistake. If you spend a mixed UTXO alongside an unmixed one, the common-input-ownership heuristic links them. All the privacy gained from mixing is destroyed. Always use coin control and never let your wallet automatically select inputs from different privacy categories.
Sending mixed Bitcoin directly to a KYC exchange. Depositing freshly mixed UTXOs to an exchange that knows your identity immediately re-links them to you. Exchanges can also question, freeze or refuse deposits with CoinJoin history. If you need to sell mixed Bitcoin, use a peer-to-peer market without identity checks; the platforms in our lesson on buying bitcoin without KYC work for selling too.
Using the same wallet for pre-mix and post-mix funds. Mixing within a single wallet risks accidental cross-contamination through automatic coin selection. Keep compartments apart: Ashigaru uses separate Premix, Postmix and Badbank accounts, and JoinMarket NG uses separate mixdepths. Don’t defeat that separation by moving coins back together.
Spending straight after one round. One round gives a limited crowd (five coins in a Whirlpool-style round), and spending minutes later makes timing analysis easier. Let your coins remix and wait before spending, but don’t treat any round count as a guarantee: repeated rounds with the same participants add little.
Ignoring network-level privacy during mixing. Running CoinJoin transactions through a public Electrum server reveals your mixed addresses to the server operator. Connecting without Tor exposes your IP address. Both create correlations that undermine the mixing. Always connect through Tor to your own node when performing CoinJoin operations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CoinJoin legal?
A CoinJoin is an ordinary Bitcoin transaction built together with other people. The best-known prosecution, Samourai Wallet’s, targeted the people running the service: its founders pleaded guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and in November 2025 were sentenced to five and four years in prison. Rules differ by country, so check yours. As an individual user, the risk you are most likely to meet is an exchange questioning, freezing or refusing coins with CoinJoin history. Tax reporting obligations remain the same regardless of whether CoinJoin is used — you must accurately report capital gains and income.How much does a CoinJoin cost in total?
Cost depends on the tool (figures as of November 2026). Wasabi with a coordinator that charges no fee costs the mining fee for your share of the transaction, plus at most a 10,000-sat leftover per round. Ginger Wallet charges 0.3% on coins above 0.03 BTC (coins of 0.03 BTC or less, and remixes, are free), plus mining fees. Ashigaru’s Whirlpool charges 5% of the pool size per entry (125,000 sats for the 0.025 BTC pool, 1,250,000 sats for the 0.25 BTC pool), plus mining fees, with free remixes; one entry can create up to 20 pool-sized coins, so entering with more at once lowers the percentage. With JoinMarket NG, takers pay the fees set in the makers’ offers plus mining fees, and makers earn those fees instead. PayJoin adds no fee beyond mining fees, since it is folded into a real payment. Across any tool, mining fees vary with mempool congestion.Can chain analysis firms detect CoinJoin transactions?
Yes, CoinJoin transactions have distinctive on-chain characteristics: multiple equal-value outputs, specific transaction sizes, and patterns consistent with known implementations. Chain analysis firms can identify CoinJoin transactions with high confidence. However, identification is not the same as deanonymization. While they can flag that a CoinJoin occurred, they cannot determine which input funded which output, unless a dishonest coordinator, a Sybil attack or careless spending afterwards gives it away. The privacy benefit comes from the broken link between inputs and outputs, not from the mixing being hidden. PayJoin is the exception: it is built to look like an ordinary payment.Related Resources
- Whirlpool CoinJoin: Step-by-Step Tutorial — Historical walkthrough of the original Whirlpool workflow (the Samourai coordinator was seized in April 2024; see the live paths above).
- Bitcoin Privacy: Why It Matters and How Chain Analysis Works — Comprehensive privacy strategies beyond CoinJoin.
- Buy Non-KYC Bitcoin: Privacy Methods Guide — Acquire Bitcoin without creating identity links in the first place.
- All Bitcoin Privacy guides — Every article in our privacy category, including the UTXO management practices that preserve CoinJoin gains.
- Why Run Your Own Bitcoin Node — Ensure your CoinJoin operations use private infrastructure.
