chepicap.com
LongHash recently reported that the use of Bitcoin mixing technology, often called "CoinJoins," has been steadily on the rise over the last year. This could be due to more people wanting anonymous financial options, but who are also shying away from known privacy coins such as Monero.
CoinJoins, sometimes referred to mixing or tumbling your Bitcoins, is basically a way to add privacy to Bitcoin transactions. Inherently, Bitcoin is actually not great for anonymity, as every single transaction is recorded on the blockchain. Sure, proving ownership of a specific address adds a step, but nothing about the actual transactions is obscured.
CoinJoins help with this by batching together several transactions into a larger transaction. In this way, many different people put their coins into one big transaction that then has multiple outputs to all intended recipients. It isn't perfect, but instead of "person x sent y Bitcoin to person z," it is now "these dozens of people sent money to these dozens of people, but we have no idea who sent what to who."
There have been a few spikes of CoinJoin activity in the past, but this latest spike arguably represents the most actual users, as the size of the Bitcoin network and its user base have risen considerably.
The reason for this rise isn't entirely clear, but it could be people who want anonymity but don't want to use coins that may make them a target, like Monero or Zcash. It could also be due to the rise in popularity of Wasabi Wallet, which has CoinJoin technology built in.
In any event, it does look like users want more anonymous transactions. Will this trend continue? Stick with Chepicap for any and all updates!