Phoenix Wallet and Wasabi Wallet will cease services for U.S. customers due to concerns about increased regulatory crackdowns in the country.
"Recent regulatory action against Consensys and Samourai has instilled fear among other crypto service providers operating in the United States."
Wasabi is the main competitor to Samourai's whirpool mixing service. The only one flying under the radar currently is Joinmarket.
Phoenix is the Lightning network wallet where users keep custody of their funds, but the channel management is outsourced to the company. The only remaining self custodial lightning wallet that remains is Breez.
While this news is deeply troubling, it might push further development to more sustainable trustless self-custodial solutions in the long term.
Xmr is too much of a pain in the ass to use. Dash is so much easier and is seeing so much more development on the ux side of things. It's much easier to scramble funds on chain with dash than with most other coins.
Monero may be a good option for some individual users right now, but it isn't a long-term solution for bringing financial privacy to the masses. That pretty much has to be done through Bitcoin wallets with privacy features. Bitcoin is already criticized for not scaling well, but Monero is far worse. If I remember correctly, Monero transactions are roughly 4 times as large as Bitcoin transactions, and they don't have any way to do off-chain transactions the way Bitcoin can with Lightning.
How big is a Bitcoin transaction anyway? Because a Monero transaction is about one and a half to two kilobytes and we will soon be adding full-chain membership proofs which if I'm understanding correctly we'll bring it to about three kilobytes per transaction. Keep in mind we have dynamic block scaling so that the blocks will get larger as more transactions come in. It seems like lightning service providers may very well be considered money transmitters and therefore lightning would become even more centralized than it already is.