Tornado Cash: How It’s Stirring Up a Storm in the Crypto World

Numerous crypto projects have become popular before meeting some form of controversy. A large number of them provide investors with a unique “hook” or feature that grabs their attention. In the case of Tornado Cash, this feature involves transaction anonymity by acting as a crypto mixer. Despite its advantages, the popular cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash has already stirred up a storm in the crypto world, the details of which are discussed further in this article.

What Is Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash is a decentralized, noncustodial privacy platform that's built directly on Ethereum. Users can deposit and withdraw ERC-20 tokens and ETH via the platform's smart contract solution, with completely different addresses, thereby enhancing transaction privacy between their deposit and withdrawal addresses.

Whenever a user intends to make a deposit with ERC-20 tokens or ETH into the Tornado Cash protocol’s liquidity pools, the protocol first generates a secret hash before admitting both the deposit and the hash. When the individual intends to withdraw their crypto, they simply input the secret hash to prove their ownership over the funds. Since the funds go through the protocol’s liquidity pools first, it becomes impossible to link the deposit to the withdrawal. This provides total asset privacy.

Currently, Tornado Cash is owned in full by its community, to whom ownership was transferred in 2020 when the Tornado Cash team relinquished its control. Since then, Tornado Cash has been a fully decentralized protocol.