• Tornado Cash is a decentralized, non-custodial privacy solution built on Ethereum. It improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between source and destination addresses. Tornado Cash uses a smart contract that accepts ETH and ERC-20 deposits to do this.

  • The anonymity of Tornado Cash is derived from the size of its anonymity set, i.e., the amount of ETH and ERC-20 tokens that are deposited into the Tornado Cash contract. Deposits to the Tornado Cash contract can be withdrawn by any on-chain address. Withdrawals are made by using zk-SNARK technology, which requires a trusted set-up.

  • TORN is Tornado Cash's native utility token and is used in the following functions:

    • Governance: TORN token holders can propose and vote on network governance decisions. Users will need to stake their tokens in the governance contract for voting power, which cannot be unlocked before the execution period (~8 days from proposal creation). Users will also need to have at least 1000 TORN to create a proposal.

    • Anonymity Mining: Users may deposit ETH, wBTC, and USD stablecoins on the platform to accumulate Anonymity Points (AP) over time. AP points can be converted into TORN tokens from the AP/TORN pool, where 1MM TORN tokens will be continuously deposited over 12 months.

  • The protocol consists of the following major components working in conjunction:

    • Shielded accounts: After a user deposits into Tornado.Cash, a user will accrue private Anonymity Points (AP) into a shielded account — which shields your wallet address, your balance, and doesn’t leak any information about your deposits.

    • Relayers: Relayers may be used to withdraw to an account with no ETH balance. The relayer sends a withdrawal transaction and takes a part of the deposit as compensation (the protocol itself does not collect any fees). The relayer cannot change any withdrawal data including the source address.

    • Compliance: At the time of deposit, the platform generates a private note to be used for withdrawals, and can be used to prove the funds' origin. Users may enter their private note into the compliance tool to generate a PDF report.

  • The project has not conducted any fundraising rounds.

  • The TORN governance token has a fixed total supply of 10,000,000.

    • 5% of the total token supply was allocated to a community airdrop to early users of the protocol.

    • 10% of the total token supply was allocated to liquidity mining rewards (distributed linearly over 1 year).

    • 30% of the total token supply was allocated to the founding developers and early supporters (unlocked over 3 years with a 1 year cliff).

    • 55% of the total token supply was allocated to the protocol treasury (unlocked linearly over 5 years).

  • Early users may claim their airdropped tokens here, which will be transferred to the DAO Treasury if unclaimed after 1 year.

  • As at June 11th 2021, the total supply of TORN is 10,000,000 and the current circulating supply is 813,211 (~8.13% of the total token supply)

  • Learn more about the token economics of TORN here.

Development activity