Top Users

The charts below show top users of the protocol since 2022 based on their tx count and transferred volume.

Protocol Overview After Sanctions

Here we can see the results of the sanctions on protocol.

Only about 30 unique users have used it and a very small volume been transfered.

Protocol Overview

In this section we are taking a look at the performance of the protocol during 2022.

The following can be inferred:

• Since 2022, almost $4.34 Billion has been transferred through Tornado Cash.
• More than 13.6K users have used it.
• There was a drop in volume since June.
• There is a increased volume between June 27 and July 3, after this period, there is relatively lower volume.
• Although the average volume has decreased the number of transaction has not changed significantly throughout the period.
• There are a few periods of reduced user count, such as second half of april and last days of May, but in July 7th there is a drastic decrease in daily unique user count.
• In the final days of July, the withdrawn volume has increased sharply.
• The Top transferred token is ETH (91%) followed by DAI.

Tornado Cash Addresses

The following table shows all addresses associated with Tornado Cash protocol available in the Flipside Crypto database, we have categorized these addresses by their status.

More than 60% of these are addresses are already banned.

Approach

Tables

The following tables are used:

flipside_prod_db.crosschain.address_labels → to access addresses related to tornado cash

ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers → to get all ETH transfers

ethereum.core.ez_token_transfers → to access all token transfers

Blocked Addresses

The addresses of the wallets that are being sanctioned can be found on the website of the US Treasury Department:

Withdraw or Deposit

By looking at the ORIGIN_FUNCTION_SIGNATUREof the transactions we can find the transactions that are withdrawing or depositing.

    case 
      when origin_function_signature = '0xb438689f' then 'Withdraw'
      when origin_function_signature = '0x13d98d13' then 'Deposit' 
    end as actions,

Duration

The study is conducted since 2022, The study starting date can be changed using the parameter provided.

Whales

as described in the User Distribution section**,** users with more than $100K transfered are counted as whales.

Introduction

Tornado Cash is a mixer, a protocol designed to pool funds in an effort to obfuscate the origin of any given transaction.

In order to achieve privacy, Tornado Cash leverages smart contracts that accept token deposits from one address and enable their withdrawal from a different address. Those smart contracts work as pools that mix all deposited assets.

Sanctions

US authorities claimed that a significant number of funds flowing through Tornado Cash were linked to criminal activities, such as North Korea's earnings from hacking exchanges and various crypto services.

The Lazarus Group, a well-known North Korean government-backed hacking group that has conducted numerous data breaches, both politically and sometimes financially motivated, has laundered at least $455 million through Tornado Cash, the Treasury said, although Pyongyang has denied the accusations.

Whale activity

Here we can see the transaction done by whales as defined in the approach section.

These users have done 4.18 Billion dollars in volume, the top 7 percent of the users have done more than 70% percent of the volume.

User Distribution

The following charts show the user distribution based on tx count and volume transferred.

• Most users have done between 1 to 10 transactions. almost 98% of them.
• The top 7% of users by volume are selected as Whales.