Introduction

Tornado.Cash is a fully decentralized, non-custodial protocol that improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between the sender and recipients’ addresses. To improve privacy, Tornado.Cash uses a smart contract that accepts ETH and other tokens from one address and allows them to withdraw to a different address.

Tornado has 4 type of Ethereum transactions and each of them has respective contracts in charge of receiving and sending an specific amount of ETH. 0.1ETH, 1ETH, 10ETH and 100ETH (there isn’t any option to send more than 100ETH in single transaction), the reason is behind is to make the transactions unified so a transaction can’t be traced by its specific amount.

for example if an address was able to send 1.5266ETH and another address withdraw this amount it would be easy to link the sender and receiver.

in this dashboard we’re going to analyze the popularity of tornado addresses in different timeframes.

In August 8, 2022 US, Department of Treasury announced that it sanctions notorious virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash.

Part I. Tornado Cash addresses received the most number and volume of transactions in the last month, quarter, year.

looking at Chart #1 we can see that during the past month tornados contract address that receives the 1ETH deposit is the most popular one compared to others and 10ETH address comes next, this is an indication that most Tornado Cash users don’t tend to use it for sending little amount of money.

we can see the similar pattern in the last quarter.

things change a little bit ==when we switch our timeframe to last year and we can see 100ETH address passes 0.1ETH address in number of transactions received while 1ETH and 10ETH remain close.

Chart #2 shows us the volume of this transactions again in different timeframes.

in each three timeframe the 100ETH address has received the most volume worth of ETH (in USD) and 10ETH, 1ETH and 0.1ETH addresses come in next in order.

Part II. Overall Transaction and Volume Received by each Tornado Cash address.

as we said earlier it isn’t possible to send a desired amount of ETH using Tornado Cash and you have only 4 Options which helps transactions to harder to trace.

in this part of the analysis we going to find out the overall number and volume received by Tornado Cash’s ethereum contracts.

note that since ethereum.core.fact_traces contains the same transaction hash multiple times by different event types, we only going to count the distinct ones sending the funds to the Tornado contract address for the sake of being more accurate in our results.

looking at pie charts #3 and #4, we can see the details about each address, the number of transactions and the overall worth of funds each address received.

with nearly 6.5 Billion Dollars worth of Ethereum mixed using Tornados 100ETH address which accounts for 85% overall funds received by Tornado Cash it’s clear that this platform used mostly for moving big funds, and it’s also been the choice of DeFi protocols exploiters to clean the dirty money, as both of Harmony Protocol and Ronin Bridge exploit, hackers sent over 165 million worth of ethereum to the Tornado Mixer.

as we found out in the first part of the dashboard, Tornado users tend not to use it for sending small amounts of funds and only 0.06% (about 5 million dollars) of overall funds sent to tornado cash address accounts for 0.1ETH transactions.

Verdicts

• there’s 4 contract address of Tornado Cash receiving 0.1ETH, 1ETH, 10ETH and 100ETH.

• in monthly, quarterly and yearly timeframes the 100ETH had the most volume (worth in USD)

• 1ETH contract had the most number of transaction received in all timeframes.

• in yearly timeframe 100ETH address received more number of transaction than 0.1ETH address

• most wallets interacting with Tornado Cash using it to move big funds.

• 100ETH contract address accounts for more than 85% of funds sent to Tornado.

• 1ETH contract address has the most transactions received and accounts for only 1.5% of the total value.

• 0.1ETH contract address only accounts for 0.06% of the funds received.

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Methodology and Related Sources

• i used flipside’s crosschain.address_labels and ethereum.core.fact_traces tables for my analysis joined by

  ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices table to determine the Ethereum price of received funds.

• Tornado Cash Website (not accessible at the time of writing)

• Harmony Protocol and Ronin Bridge Hackers Use Tornado Cash.

• U.S Department of Treasury Sanctions Tornado Cash

• SlowMist Analyzing Tornado Cash Transactions (Mar 22th, 2022)

• Tornado Cash resources seized and banned. (by Circle Pay, Github, Gitcoin, Infura and many more)