What is happening?

Yesterday, Aug 9th, 2022, We have heard the bad news! USA government banned using tornado cash for its citizens and also blacklisted many addresses that belong to this protocol or previously had used its services.

This is a great deal for crypto currency space as it is one of the strictest moves against it, and one of the signs that regulatories are entering the scene strongest as ever.

So, What is Tornado.Cash Anyway?

Tornado.Cash is protocol providing privacy transaction services on Ethereum blockchain.

To put in short and simple, with tornado cash people are able to transfer some assets (Like ETH, USDC, USDT, DAI, WBTC) without being tracked. Yes, it can be used as money laundering but it has many other use cases too.

For example, while the axie infinity hacker group known as Lazarus from north korea used Tornado to transfer the exploited assets (Bad usecase), Vitalik Buterin the founder of Ethereum and many others used it to help Ukraine in war against Russia.

Data & Analysis

Now that US government decided to ban Tornado, We are using this public awareness and attention to take a look at its performance over the past year in different timeframes.

We are going to see which contracts (Which are essentially representing the different Asset/Amount options) were used the most in terms of number of interaction and volume of transfer.

I am going to show you the information 4 different timeframes:

1. July (last month)
2. Past 3 Months
3. Past Year (Past 365 days)
4. August 2022 (Current Month in so far)

First of all, this worth mentioning that ETH transfer is much more popular that other options like Stablecoins and WBTC.

In past 365 days more than 95% of transferred assets (USD Volume) were ETH and beside from DAI and WBTC there is no remarkable volume for other Non-ETH assets.

In next 4 Charts you can see how each contract performed in different timeframes:

Some Notes:

• ETH transfer dominance is even more evident in terms of number of transactions since the 4 contracts for ETH transfer ( 0.1, 1, 10, and 100) are the most interacted with.
• In all circumstances 1 eth Transfer was the most used contract
• 1000 USDT contract managed to take DAI spot in July which worth noticing
• In August, USDC 1000 was the most transferred asset which have never happened before
• In August 9 (Announcement day) There is sudden growth in 0.1 ETH transfer. I’ve Read somewhere that people are abusing this fact to disrupt some addresses reputation.

Volume Performance

Next charts are showing the same comparison on the same timeframes, but this time in terms of volume of transfers.

• The combination of 100 ETH as #1, 10 ETH as #2 and 100000 DAI as #3 is constant in all timeframes.
• 100 ETH contract kept its popularity rolling over to august.

Takeaways:

• ETH transfer is more popular than other assets transfers.
• 100 ETH contract is by far the most popular contract; That might be one reason to suspect some activity since regular user are not capable of constantly transferring these high amounts.
• DAI is the most popular after ETH
• There is a few usage in low amounts which suggests that average user probably is not interested in Tornado services.