Tech investment firm Cypherpunk Holdings announced that it has secured a 4.5% stake of zkSNACKs – the company behind Wasabi Wallet – to the tune of $337,500, according to a press release published on Thursday, Nov. 21. Aside from the equity investment, Cypherpunk Holdings' Chief Investment Officer Moe Adham has become zkSnacks’ board of directors as well.
Cypherpunk Holdings President and CEO Dominic Frisby said that this process has been a long time coming and congratulated everyone who’s been involved in making the deal a success. Frisby also praised Wasabi Wallet and zkSNACKs for the progress it’s been seeing following its launch.
“It’s extraordinary for a tech company, this early in its evolution, to have the revenues that Wasabi already has. It’s one of the only forms of a crypto wallet that have a revenue model,” Frisby commented.
Wasabi Wallet earning its stripes
Wasabi Wallet has seen tremendous success due to the strong security and privacy it offers to crypto users. So strong, in fact, that zkSNACKs earned 14 bitcoins through its mixer transaction in July alone. That’s $105,000 by current valuation as Bitcoin is trading at $7,531.
Wasabi Wallet’s arrival in the crypto scene has been met with general positivity since the privacy it offers shield users from the wallet itself. Indeed, while other mixers still keep a user’s data during a transaction, Wasabi Wallet completely blinds itself from this information in a bid to create a stronger privacy feature for its clients.
Wasabi Wallet’s flaw according to its competition
But there are still some detractors out there, among which is Samourai Wallet, a competition of Wasabi. In July, Samoura said that the security measures that Wasabi is implementing aren’t as strong as what zkSNACKs claim, pointing out a flaw in the protocol’s system, Cointelegraph reported.
“With Wasabi if you are mixing 10 BTC, I can trivially track that 10 BTC as it is peeled down into smaller UTXOS (unspent funds) ... Additionally, Wasabi outputs are in the order in which they are registered, allowing you to make educated guesses that cluster outputs that you can later cross reference when inputs are inevitably merged to make a spend,” Samourai said.
Interestingly enough, Cypherpunk also holds equity investment in Samourai, which amounts to $100,000 or 1.5% equity. Frisby said that they aim to invest more in 2020 although he didn’t disclose any information on what company they’re eyeing next.
Comment 17