Elliptic says 22% of bitcoins from Twitter hack were likely sent to a Wasabi Wallet address for mixing

Blockchain analysis company Elliptic released a report today saying 2.89 bitcoins were sent to an address it believes to be a part of a Wasabi Wallet. 

According to the report, the funds, which account for 22% of the funds obtained by the Twitter hacker, were sent to a Wasabi Wallet address late Thursday night. Elliptic used a special feature to identify Wasabi Wallet addresses using what it called "distinctive transaction patterns." Blockchain data analyzed by The Block Research previously identified signs of mixing transactions.

Wasabi Wallet allows its users to mix up their coins for anonymity purposes, effectively also mixing up their trail of transactions. Wasabi employs so-called CoinJoins, which, as its website describes, constitute "[a] mechanism by which multiple participants combine their coins (or UTXOs, to be more precise) into one large transaction with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. An observer cannot determine which output belongs to which input, and neither can the participants themselves."

The report said the main challenge hackers face now is cashing out their bitcoins. If crypto exchanges use monitoring tools to track transactions on the blockchain, the origin of the funds can be traced back to the source. Wasabi Wallets make it more difficult to trace the movement of funds in this way because "the blockchain trail is no longer visible."

Zksnacks, the company behind Wasabi, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.