7 year anniversary

This post is adapted from a Tweet posted on Feb 9, 2022

7 years ago today TDevD and I were sitting in a seedy London pub writing down our mission statement on a damp bar napkin.

We can't believe how far the project has come nor how full our backlog still is. Join us as we look back at an abridged timeline of the last 7 years.

2015-2017 - The Grind

Starting as a 'nights and weekend' side project with only the two of us, progress was slow, but we managed to achieve some major milestones such as being the first wallet to implement BIP47 stealth addresses and the first mobile wallet to give users full miner fee control

2017 was a really contentious year in the bitcoin ecosystem. Our wallet was the first to alert users to chain splits and offer replay protection to protect themselves from replay attacks. We started work on our CoinJoin implementation, and fully implemented Segwit

Towards the end of 2017 we introduced the concept of Coin Control to the mobile wallet as well as the ability for users to mark UTXOs spendable or unspendable. We were the first to implement a warning system to alert users when they were being subjected to a dusting attack

2018 - 2019 - Going Full Time

In 2018 we were finally able to go 'full-time'. No longer a nights and weekend project we hustled to implement native segwit addresses, launch STONEWALL and improve Ricochet More controversially we removed fiat exchange rate entirely and implemented the sats unit display

In 2019 we were the first to build in an integrated Tor layer in the wallet a big milestone. We started working on STONEWALLx2 and Stowaway as p2p collaborative transactions, we launched and open sourced our Dojo server software, and we started a closed public beta for Whirlpool

2020 - The Pool is Now Open

In 2020 we fully launched Whirlpool on mobile a huge milestone for us (work began in 2017!) In August we passed 100,000 installs of the mobile app and we started work on improving STONEWALLx2 and Stowaway with use of Soroban a Tor based encrypted comms layer

2021 - More Privacy Is More Better

2021 was about increasing access to our software. We launched the popular 0.001 btc pool in Whirlpool with a fee of just 5,000 sats. We reduced the fee of the 0.05 and 0.5 btc pools by 30%. We reduced the ricochet fee by 50% In August Whirlpool unspent capacity breaks 4,000 btc

We were proud to end 2021 with a 1 BTC donation to the Tor Project to help support the development and maintenance of an important technology we all depend on. A huge milestone was achieved when SparrowWallet implemented our Whirlpool tech in their wallet

Our team is still small, but we're tight knit and can punch above our weight. We have big plans for the coming years and our backlog is still full. We sincerely thank you all for coming on this journey with us