Tornado Cash Sanctions

What is Tornado Cash and why would it be targeted by the US government? Why might an address interact with the service?

The addresses tied to the service have been publicly posted online. Using those addresses answer the following:

How many addresses are still using the service despite the sanctions?
Which addresses have been interacting the most with Tornado Cash?
Break the addresses down by frequency and volume of tokens and describe how the groups are using the service differently.
Is there anything else interesting about its users?

Top 5 users based on the USD volume

Daily total

Number of unique user

The highest number of users that had activity in Tornado from August 1st till August 10th was on August 2nd. The total number of unique users on this day was 214.
The sanctions were announced on ==August 8th.== The number of unique users decreased on August 9th to 64 users.
The cumulative number of unique users over the past 10 days was 1467.

USD volume

The highest USD volume on Tornado also was on August 2nd. On this day, the volume of USD that had been transferred to Tornado was around 47.64 million.
On this day, the $7.8 million crypto theft in the very recent August 2nd, 2022, Nomad Heist.
As I said before on the info part, the Nomad Heist hacked was one of the reasons that the US blacklisted the Tornado.
The USD volume had a massive growth on August 2nd compared to the previous day. The cumulative USD volume on August 1st was 15.3 million USD and increased to 63 million USD on August 2nd.
After the sanctions were announced, the USD volume decreased from around 11.5 million USD to 3.6 million USD.

Number of transactions

The highest number of transactions was on August 2nd, with 641 transactions.
After the announcement, the number of transactions on Tornado increased because users wanted to deposit their assets.
The number of transactions on August 9th(the day after the sanctions were announced) was 316.

Per address

Number of transactions

Add Text The address that had been used the most over the past 10 days was Cash:router.

This address had been used the most almost every day. On August 2nd, when the most number of transactions was on this day, this address was used 582 times.

Number of unique users

Also, the cash:router address was the first address users used to make transactions.

The second address was cash: 100 ETH address which gained more users.

Info

What is Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash is a transaction ‘mixer’ protocol for private transactions on Ethereum’s ERC-20. Using Tornado cash improves user privacy for transactions by breaking the on-chain link between source and destination addresses. The protocol effectively scrambles together funds of multiple users and their transactions so that before a given transaction reaches its intended address destination, amounts, origins, and identities are mixed and difficult to trace. Once the new address withdraws the asset, there’s no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit and this, in turn, ensures asset privacy. While not a typical mixer due to private transactions, the protocol provides relatively simple and user-friendly privacy tools. However, protocols like Tornado Cash and recent large-scale hacks certainly bring up interesting debates surrounding privacy and public perceptions of crypto used for anonymous criminal activity and money laundering.

Blockchain transactions aren’t private (they are fully public & visible, merely pseudonymous). Tornado Cash was born to solve this “problem” of transparent pseudonymity.

Tornado Cash is a decentralized & non-custodial privacy solution built on Ethereum.

Tornado Cash, which runs on immutable smart contracts, commingles crypto assets from many individuals to hide the funds’ provenance. It’s a privacy tool with many legal and beneficial uses, such as donating to politically-charged causes privately or preventing casual financial surveillance.

Tornado Cash Sanctions

The American Treasury Department has sanctioned Tornado Cash for allegedly helping launder over $7 billion in cryptocurrency.

American people are banned from using the service.

Although Tornado Cash is used by some people just as a fair way to safeguard their privacy, the government says it breeds illegal activity, including “facilitation of rip-offs, ransomware methods, fake, and other cybercrimes.

The US treasury said that the Lazarus group, a well-known North Korean government-backed hacking group, has laundered at least $455m through Tornado Cash. This group is under US sanctions. The US sanctions Tornado Cash over suspicions of helping North Korean hackers. US treasury says popular cryptocurrency service reportedly laundered more than $ 7 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

The United States on Monday charged sanctions on Tornado Cash, a popular cryptocurrency service that lets users hide their transactions, charging it with helping hackers, including North Korea, to launder profits from their cybercrimes.

The United States and South Korea have said North Korea has rallied thousands of hackers to steal accounts, including cryptocurrencies, to finance its pike's programs. Tornado Cash was also used to launder about $100m after the hack of Horizon Bridge, a service operated by the Harmony blockchain, in June and as recently as last week in the $190m hack of crypto startup Nomad.

USD volume

The address that had the most volume was also cash: router. On August 2nd, this address had around 23 million USD volume.
The second address was cash: 100 eth. The USD volume of this address on August 2nd was almost 19.5 million USD.

Per symbols

Ethereum was the token that had been used the most.

On August 2nd, 594 transactions used ETH, and 40 used DAI.

On the day of sanction, August 8th, 252 transactions used ETH, one transaction used DAI, and one transaction used USDC.
On August 9th, 313 transactions used ETH, one transaction was made using DAI, and one used NPQ.

Number of transactions

Number of users

Ethereum was the token users preferred the most to make transactions on Tornado.

On August 2nd, 205 users used ETH, 11 used DAI, and only two preferred USDT.

On the day of sanction, August 8th, 133 users used ETH, 12 used DAI and only two preferred USDC.
On August 9th, 61 users used ETH, two used DAI, and one preferred NPQ.

Tokens amount

DAI was the token that ad the most amount to make transactions on Tornado.

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On August 2nd, the amount of DAI that had a part in transactions on Tornado was 5 million, 12k USDC was used to make transactions, 26.5k ETH had been used and 2000 USDT had been used to make transactions

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On the day of sanction, August 8th, 20k DAI, 2,038 ETH, and 2000 USDC had been used to make transactions on Torando.

USD volume

Ethereum was the token that had the most USD volume.
On August 2nd, the volume of ETH was 42.6 million USD, DAI was 5 million USD, USDC was 12k USD, and the volume of USDT was 2 USD.
On the day of sanction, August 8th, the volume of ETH was 3.5 million USD, DAI was around 20k USD, and USDC was almost 2000 USD.

Top 5 users based on the number of transactions

Based on the number of transactions, the first users of the top 5 users made 3180 transactions over the past ten days.
The second user made 16 transactions.

Based on the USD volume, the first user of the top 5 users used around 60 million USD to make transactions.
The USD volume of the second user was almost 80k.