What is Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash, along with other mixers such as AlphaBay, enables customers to conceal the source of their crypto funds when participating in a transaction in exchange for a fee. It blends potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others to obfuscate the source and destination of crypto assets.

What are sanctions?

Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual. Economic sanctions are not necessarily imposed because of economic circumstances—they may also be imposed for a variety of political, military, and social issues.

What is happening to Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash is in the news due to the sanctions imposed by the US government and the freezing of $75K of USDC from Circle. The addresses tied to the service have been publicly posted online. 

Methodology

In this dashboard we are looking to see the activity on Tornado cash wallets to see how the protocol is being used and what contracts are the most popular. we will visualize the following metrics:

• Transactions/users by wallet.
• ETH volume/transactions by transaction size.
• ERC20 volume/transactions by transaction size.

Observations

• In the past 30 Days There have been 63.6K Tornado cash users sending over 500K transactions.
• The top 4 Tornado addresses in terms of use in the past 30 days are Torn Token, 1 ETH Mixer, 10 ETH Mixer, Proxy Contract.
• The top 3 contracts by number of transactions make up about 50% of all transactions.

Observations

• The vast majority of all Tornado cash ETH Volume is between 10 and 100 ETH in size.
• 0.1 - 1 and 1 - 10 ETH transactions make up 60% of all ETH transactions on Tornado Cash.
• The number of transactions on Tornado cash have been consistently increasing while volume has stayed the same.

Observations

• 76% of the transactions and Nearly 100% of the Stablecoin volume sent toTornado cash was in DAI.
• In April 2022 there was a big jump in Stablecoin transaction volume on Tornado cash.

Conclusion

In the past 30 Days There have been 63.6K Tornado cash users sending over 500K transactions. The top 4 Tornado addresses in terms of use in the past 30 days are Torn Token, 1 ETH Mixer, 10 ETH Mixer, Proxy Contract. 0.1 - 1 and 1 - 10 ETH transactions make up 60% of all ETH transactions on Tornado Cash, while vast majority of all Tornado cash ETH Volume is between 10 and 100 ETH in size. 76% of the transactions and Nearly 100% of the Stablecoin volume sent toTornado cash was in DAI. Overall Tornado cash wallets are extremely active and have a huge volume of ETH transferred through them.