Ginger Wallet — first contact
The wind of change
It felt like a sudden hurricane hit us. The announcement that zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi, was shutting down caught everyone on the dev team off guard.
Almost everyone received a termination notice. Without funding from the coordination service, there’s no way to pay the contributors anymore. Three of the best team members were chosen to keep the project going, aiming to “maintain basic wallet functionalities and remove the reliance of the wallet synchronization backend”. I wish them the best of luck. As for the rest of us, we had to start job hunting again.
Fork in the road
After many years of working on Bitcoin development, the thought of going back to the job market was pretty overwhelming. Management really stepped up, though. They reached out to many of our partners to help us developers find new jobs right away. I want to take this opportunity to express my deepest appreciation for their support.
A small team of former Wasabi devs, including me, decided to team up and brainstorm different kinds of ideas. We came up with a couple of interesting concepts, but nothing could beat the offer that came next.
A few days later, Martin Rimoczi showed up with an exciting proposition. He was looking for developers for his new project, aiming to continue the coordination similar to what zkSNACKs did. He had just created InvisibleBit LLC, which is entirely independent of zkSNACKs. He asked if we wanted to contribute to a fork of the client software for him, and that’s how the GingerPrivacy team was born.
GingerPrivacy team
GingerPrivacy is an independent team of open-source software artists.
Brief introduction about the GingerPrivacy team:
The UI guy: Soosr
As I said back then the UI Refreshment of Wasabi was just a first step, it will be continued in Ginger by fixing the remaining design issues and providing an interface for the user that feels unintentionally relieving. Meanwhile, we won’t forget about the hardcore Bitcoiners, their needs will be served as well.
The Hardware wallet guy: Whem
As a former hardware specialist at Wasabi Wallet, I am joining the Ginger Wallet team. My main objectives include developing a universal hardware wallet CoinJoin and implementing specific functionalities for various hardware wallets. Among my initial implementations will be integrating BitBox02 pairing and establishing full air-gapped communication with Blockstream Jade. To achieve this, I will be building a new layer on top of the existing HWI repository, ensuring that the current compatibility solutions remain intact.
The Bad guy: Molnard
I’ll be here to ensure the stability and integrity of the software, taking care of the repository and the infrastructure. Consider me the guardian of our digital fortress.
Communication: CAnorbo
Technical guy: DarkGrey
Plus, we have a few, external contributors that we trust.
Our goal is the same as before, to bring privacy into bitcoin for the users.
Can you trust us? Don’t just trust — verify. Most of us have a long history with Wasabi, so you can check our track record yourself.
Here’s an old picture of us:
Why fork?
We concluded with the Wasabi maintainer that our future directions were different, so we decided to create a fork of the Wasabi project. The fork was created recently after Wasabi v2.0.7.2, with no functional changes — just rebranding. Currently, both Wasabi and Ginger clients are compatible with the Ginger coordinator. However, this might change in the future, so I highly suggest downloading the Ginger Wallet client from our website.
The differences won’t set us apart; instead, they’ll provide more opportunities for us to learn from each other. From time to time, we’ll contribute to each other’s projects — just like open-source developers do.
Follow us on Twitter for updates!
Who am I?
Former developer/maintainer/team leader of Wasabi Wallet — Joined on the day of Wasabi 1.0 release on 31st of October 2018.
