The team from the Samourai Wallet, which bills itself as “a Bitcoin wallet for the streets” thanks to its heavy focus on privacy and security has reached a critical milestone in its development that will finally allow the wallet to transition from its alpha release into full production release.
The big news is the release of the Samourai Dojo software. Long in development by the Samourai team, the Samourai Dojo is open-source software that augments a Bitcoin core full node and makes the Samourai wallet the most private Bitcoin wallet available. The software has been in development since 2015, making this a huge milestone for the team and the project.
For the privacy conscious this is also a huge leap forward. It means you can run your own full Bitcoin Core node without having to share your public keys with the Samourai servers. It’s the most private way to use Bitcoin ever.
You can learn more about the privacy and security features in our full Samourai wallet review.
The Privacy Focused Wallet
The Samourai has always had the most advanced transactional privacy features in the industry, allowing users to avoid outside surveillance of their financial transactions on the blockchain, however in order to take advantage of these features they did need to give up their public keys to the Samourai servers, keeping wallet usage somewhat centralized still, and theoretically giving the team behind Samourai the ability to track your financial activities.
While the Samourai Dojo software has been tested on all Samourai clients, you are now able to download the open-source software yourself and run your own Dojo server. This means you bypass the Samourai servers completely and enhance your financial privacy. The Dojo supports all of the functionality currently included in the wallet, including:
- Provides unspent output lists to Samourai Wallet using your backing full node
- Provides fee rates to use from your local mempool.
- Mempool Orchestrator for time-delayed transactions (Staggered Ricochet)
- PushTX endpoint for broadcasting transactions through your backing full node
Part of the task was in creating a solution that was both private and secure, while also being approachable from a technical standpoint, even by relatively inexperienced users. To that end, the Dojo software is available from GitHub as a single automated script to set up and create a full Dojo backend.
And for those who prefer a plug-and-play solution, you will soon be able to purchase a hardware product that comes with Dojo preloaded and ready to be configured. These units are in production now and are expected to be available for sale soon.
Since its early days in 2015, when the project was nothing more than two developers looking to provide Bitcoin users with more privacy, the goal of Samourai has been to open source the project and allow users to bypass the Samourai servers completely.
The Samourai wallet has remained in pre-release “Alpha” status as the team worked toward that goal. Now that the primary goal of open-sourcing the software to bypass Samourai servers is complete the team is fully focused on finally taking the Samourai wallet out of alpha status and into its 1.0 full release.
The user interface of the wallet has already been upgraded in anticipation of the full release of version 1.0. One additional update will be done to allow the wallet to pair with the Dojo software and then the full vision of the Samourai wallet will be complete.
