With the recent news that the founder of Tornado Cash is about to be released from prison and the zero-knowledge proof track is being hyped, $TRON has increased by as much as 327% compared to the lowest point of $3.4 in December last year. Let us take stock of why this code has no People are updating, the community is in chaos, and why the privacy project that has had no content on social media for a long time has returned to the level of public discussion.
What happened to Tornado Cash?
2022
On August 8, the U.S. Treasury Department placed Tornado Cash on the sanctions list, prohibiting use by U.S. citizens and institutions; Circle subsequently froze the USDC funds in the Tornado Cash wallet address approved by the U.S. Treasury Department; middleware providers such as Infura and Alchemy It has also been censored, resulting in users being unable to access their assets normally and can only complete interactions by manually setting the node configuration of the wallet; developers and community code contributors were also sanctioned.
On August 9, the Github account of the founder of Tornado Cash was suspended; Gitcoin suspended funding for Tornado Cash; the blockchain research company Elliptic marked the relevant addresses of Tornado Cash in all chains; anonymous users used Tornado Cash to report to a large number of well-known Send ETH to the person's address; as of August 9, Tornado Cash (TORN) fell to $21.94, a 24-hour drop of nearly 30%
On August 10, PeckShield pointed out that Curve attackers transferred about 340 ETH to Tornado Cash, FixedFloat and Binance respectively; Tornado Cash has transferred more than 40 million US dollars in ETH since OFAC sanctions; Tornado Cash organized The list of prohibited resources includes the Tornado Cash official website, GitHub accounts of founders, organizations and participating community builders, all $USDC in the Tornado Cash protocol, infura_io, AlchemyPlatform, and TC's RPC, etc.
This large-scale sanction directly led to a 90% drop in deposits and withdrawals from the protocol. Community contributors are also in a dilemma on whether to continue to contribute code updates. On the one hand, there are huge legal risks, and on the other hand, they are concerned about this excellent tool and the hard work they have put in. of reluctance.
What is Tornado Cash?
Tornado Cash is a decentralized, non-custodial privacy solution based on Ethereum. Its biggest highlight is that it breaks the on-chain link between the recipient address and the target address, thereby improving transaction privacy. Tornado Cash uses smart contracts that accept ETH and ERC-20 deposits, which can be withdrawn through any on-chain address. Whenever assets are withdrawn via a new address, withdrawals cannot be tied to deposits, ensuring asset privacy.
How to achieve privacy
Tornado Cash uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) for privacy. When a user decides to withdraw money, the user must provide evidence that he or she possesses a secret that corresponds to one of the smart contract’s deposit lists. The zk-SNARK technology allows this proof to be verified without the user revealing the exact deposit corresponding to their secret. The smart contract then checks the proof and transfers the deposited funds to the address specified in the withdrawal transaction. No outside observer can determine which deposit this withdrawal is linked to. TORN is the native governance token of Tornado Cash. It is a fixed-supply ERC-20 token used to vote on protocol upgrades and fixes.
To put it simply, zero-knowledge proof can not only keep my secret, but also make others believe you. For example, A has mastered the exclusive secret recipe of a certain food and goes to investor B for financing. If A just says I There was a formula, but B definitely didn't believe it, so A decided to find a way to verify it. The best way was to make the secret recipe into food and sell it on the market. Everyone found that other companies couldn't make the same food as A. The kind of flavor it makes, this proves that A has mastered this unique formula. It can not only disclose the formula ingredients to B, but also make B believe that he does have the exclusive formula. This is the magical zero-knowledge proof. Whether in life or work, zero-knowledge proofs need to be used in many places.
Next, let’s take a look at the implementation principle of Tornada Cash
1. Deposit
To make a deposit, the user generates a random key (private certificate) and sends the hash along with the required amount to the Tornado smart contract, which accepts the deposit and records the authentication that the user made the deposit and mixes the deposit into the pool. , when users make a withdrawal, they only need to provide the corresponding credentials (zero-knowledge proof technology) to initiate a withdrawal operation to the contract at any address.
2. Anonymous set
The main function of the anonymous set is to measure how much deposit you have left to withdraw, and there are two options for withdrawal
Use a decentralized wallet to get deposits through Relayer
Relayer can be understood as a relay. Its function is to completely maintain the anonymity of the withdrawer. The withdrawr only needs to create a new Ethereum wallet address, pass the zero-knowledge proof and pay a certain amount of GAS to the network. Relayer will help you complete the withdrawal operation.
Of course, complete anonymity cannot be achieved simply through this method, because some of your access traces will be left in the centralized network.
How to deal with it?
Keep your IP anonymous
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There are traces of recharge and withdrawal, such as the same amount within a short period of time, receipt at the same new address, etc.
Maintain a long enough period to ensure that the mixing pool enters a sufficient amount of funds from different sources
What is the current status of Tornado Cash?
At the end of 2022, community member gozzy launched a proposal to the community to continue to undertake the subsequent development of Tornado and was approved by the community. After the proposal was passed, gozzy began to update the use of users to log in to the website using ENS and IPFS parsers (http://3th.ws) method, and also released part of the Tornado Cash roadmap. As can be seen from the roadmap, gozzy’s current priority is to restore the Tornado Cash front-end and repeater connections. In the future, we will also update educational resources, participate in and accelerate governance, complete the expansion and development of the protocol, etc.
The above is the technical principle, working mechanism and current situation of Tornado Cash.
From the strong support of the community and developers, it is not difficult to see that the challenge to centralized hegemony has never stopped. This is also the original intention of the blockchain since its birth. As the largest privacy solution in Ethereum, Torndao is like an industry leader. The Sword of Damocles has contributed tremendously to decentralization and also left opportunities for criminals to take advantage of. The only thing that is certain is that the wave of challenges to hegemony has never stopped. Even if there are many twists and turns in the process, the trend is still unstoppable. What we have to do is to find a compromise plan instead of blindly suppressing it.
Let me end today's article with a more down-to-earth example. Kitchen knives can cut vegetables, but they can also do evil. If the production of kitchen knives is stopped because of this, then will the tool theory that humans are proud of still be tenable.