Decentralized Whirlpool : Stage 1

Today marks a huge milestone and we are excited to announce the release of an update to the Whirlpool protocol. Going forward Whirlpool client and Whirlpool Coordinator communication is now well on the road to being purely decentralized, running over Soroban; the app agnostic Tor based communication protocol.

As of today there is no longer a single hard coded Coordinator server that your mixing clients are looking for, instead Coordinator server discovery is automatic through the encrypted Soroban network. This means that even if a Coordinator goes offline unexpectedly, downtime and disruption will be minimal as clients use the Soroban network to find a replacement Coordinator server.

We call this first stage of decentralization "Whack-A-Mole".

Update your Samourai software

We now invite all users to update their Samourai software to the latest Whirlpool client version, this includes:

• Samourai Wallet 0.99.98i_dexwp
• Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1 [standalone]
• Whirlpool GUI 0.10.5 [inc. Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1 for standalone mode]
• Dojo 1.24.1 [inc. Whirlpool CLI 1.0.1]

What to expect after updating

The short answer from a Whirlpool user point of view is... nothing! This update is very much one which has been made on the backend of the codebase to allow your Whirlpool client to communicate with the Whirlpool Coordinator over Soroban.

Creating and broadcasting Tx0's and mixing/remixing remains the same workflow. For the more advanced users you will notice a change to the Whirlpool CLI logs where you can observe your client communicating over Soroban.

Whirlpool Coordinator update

Our Whirlpool Coordinator now has no static clearnet domain address (for non-Tor users), and communicates with Whirlpool clients via Soroban only. This allows us to run multiple Whirlpool Coordinators at any given time, and for example allows handover to Whirlpool Coordinator #B if Whirlpool Coordinator #A is paused for maintenance activities. This ensures those seeking to break deterministic links and gain forward and backward-looking anonymity can do so without interruption, bolsters the resilience of the Whirlpool protocol, and continues to maintain the same single liquidity pool for all connected clients.

What is Soroban?

Soroban is an open source, app agnostic, encrypted communication tool developed by Samourai Wallet several years ago. The initial use case for Soroban was to allow for seamless secure communication between individual wallets for the purpose of composing peer-to-peer collaborative transactions. Over the years we have continued to refine Soroban and make use of it to act as the communication gateway required for decentralized Whirlpool coordination. In the coming weeks more information and guides will be released to help you run your own Soroban nodes to help ensure the robustness of the decentralized Whirlpool coordination communication.

Using older Whirlpool client versions

If you are running any of the following software versions they will not be able to communicate with one of our decentralized Whirlpool Coordinators:

• Samourai Wallet 0.99.98i – and older
• Whirlpool CLI 0.10.17.1 [standalone] – and older
• Dojo 1.23.0 [inc. Whirlpool CLI 0.10.17.1] – and older

These older Whirlpool client versions running on the above software will be able to continue to create Tx0’s, mix and remix, however once we observe internally that the number of the connected Whirlpool clients running over Soroban surpasses those running an older non-Soroban Whirlpool client, we plan to decommission the centralized Whirlpool coordinator. We therefore encourage you to update to the latest software releases as soon as possible as to not cause you any inconvenience.

Thank you

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