What appears to be a benevolent plan may be a selfish attempt to increase the price of a token.

The attacker who gained control of Tornado Cash proposed a proposal on May 21 that would have reversed his initial attack.

The exploiter can undo his attack

Community member Tornadosaurus-Hex wrote:

“The Tornado Cash attacker has published a new proposal to restore the governance state, and I think there is a good chance he will execute it.”

Tornadosaurus-Hex also pointed out that because the attacker controlled Tornado Cash, other governance members had no choice as to whether the proposal passed.

Other members of the community warned that the attempt to restore the project’s default governance might not be kind. On Twitter, 0xdeadf4ce suggested that the plan could be an attempt to further manipulate the price of Tornado Cash’s TORN token.

Recovery could allow an attacker to take advantage of the fact that his initial attack resulted in a significant decrease in the value of TORN. TORN fell from $6.08 to $3.57 in a matter of hours, a drop of 41%. The price has only partially recovered to $4.73 as of May 21, and even a brief recovery could make any stolen cryptocurrency more valuable.

If the recovery proposal is not an attempt to raise prices, it could be a form of trolling or a “costly but not disastrous” lesson, 0xdeadf4ce concluded, adding that the outcome of the recovery proposal will not be clear until May 26.

The Tornado Cash attack began on Saturday

On May 20, an attacker gained control of Tornado Cash by creating and voting for a proposal that would have given him full control over the project’s governance.

Paradigm researcher Samczun said this allowed the attacker to withdraw all locked votes and withdraw all tokens from the Tornado Cash governance contract. Samczun said that while the attack allowed the attacker to "do whatever they wanted," the attacker ultimately chose to withdraw 10,000 votes as TORN tokens and sell those assets.

It is important to note that despite the U.S. Treasury imposing sanctions on the project in August 2022, Tornado Cash remains active.

The service is a decentralized mixer that only handles cryptocurrencies. It seems that the U.S. government is unable to directly impose sanctions on Tornado Cash due to the lack of a centralized operation, or is not interested in enforcing the law.