JoinMarket: An incentivized CoinJoin marketplace

Karim Helmy is an independent analyst in the cryptocurrency space with a focus on mechanism design and data analysis. Reach out at [email protected].

Bitcoin’s base layer is incredibly transparent, allowing for easy auditability and simple transaction verification. These benefits are highly desirable, since they allow users to easily run full nodes, which is a necessary precondition for decentralization. However, they come at the cost of reduced privacy, and several firms, including Chainalysis and Elliptic, have built businesses around exploiting the platform’s transparency to track Bitcoin’s users.