tornado cash

Recently, a coordinated attack was executed against Tornado Cash and its (core) developers. Under the motto of fighting against the concealing of criminal financial flows and money laundering, they’ve tried to restrict the platform usage and development. The FIOD arrested the suspected developer of Tornado Cash, OFAC installed sanctions, GitHub took down the code repositories and deleted the accounts of contributors and all the major domains were taken down.

What is the current state of Tornado Cash?

You can still access the web UI via eth.link which uses IPFS. The smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain are still operational and transacting.

Tornado Cash is still operating.

Now, these actions obviously have had an impact. Interacting with the contract is now illegal, which will prevent a group of users from using it for legal reasons. Centralised organisations, were quick to comply with the sanctions. A blessing in disguise, because this showed the centralisation that is still present in Ethereum infrastructure and blockchain in general. The most obvious impact, is the impact this will have on the development of Tornado Cash. The development has taken a massive hit, but will likely recover in the future if you ask me. It’s a battle you won’t be able to win, as you see with darknet markets as well.

Even the code itself is still broadly available via IPFS, but also again via GitHub. The EFF has started a lawsuit against GitHub for removing the original repository.

How to use Tornado Cash right now?

The only major issues are the RPC providers and the hosting itself. RPC providers are centralised entities that expose endpoints to make development easier, the solution is simple though - simply switch of RPC provider. You can even setup your own RPC provider. The hosting is something you can host yourself as well, for optimal privacy, but you can also use the IPFS available website. An easy and complete how-to for current Tornado Cash use can be found here: https://hackmd.io/@gozzy/tornado-cash-post-censorship - kuddos to @gozzy.

The beauty

The major lesson for me personally, is that we’ve come way further than some may think in terms of decentralisation. I understand and agree with most critics when they criticise the centralisation that is still present, but the fact that something like Tornado Cash has survived this well - goes to show we are on the right road. It’s also fuel for the dream of decentralisation, a dream that is required for those that value privacy for the times to come. Not only Ethereum (on which Tornado Cash is deployed), but also Bitcoin is starting (if not already) to become too big to fail - the same power international banks derive their influence from. Authorities can still make it very difficult to use, but they are not able to destroy it anymore - or at least not without exceptional self-inflicting costs to themselves.

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