Tornado Cash: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What Happened
When you send crypto, everyone can see where it came from and where it went. That’s the truth of public blockchains. Tornado Cash, a decentralized Ethereum mixer that let users obscure transaction histories by pooling funds from many users. Also known as a crypto privacy tool, it wasn’t a wallet or exchange—it was a smart contract that broke the link between sender and receiver. For years, it was the most used privacy tool in DeFi, with over $7 billion mixed. People used it for simple reasons: to protect their financial privacy, avoid surveillance, or just keep their trading habits out of public view.
But Tornado Cash didn’t just help everyday users. Bad actors used it too—hackers, scammers, ransomware gangs. That’s what got the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC to sanction it in August 2022. The government didn’t shut down the code. They banned Americans from interacting with the protocol. Developers were arrested. Wallets got frozen. Even GitHub pages were taken down. The irony? The tool was permissionless and open-source. No one owned it. No team ran it. Just code on Ethereum. And yet, regulators treated it like a company.
What followed was chaos. DeFi apps started blocking Tornado Cash addresses. Exchanges refused to touch any wallet that had ever interacted with it. Developers scrambled to build alternatives, but most got scared off by legal risk. Tools like mixer tools, software designed to break on-chain transaction trails by combining multiple inputs and outputs became toxic. Meanwhile, users who’d used Tornado Cash for legal reasons—like protecting their identity from stalkers or avoiding targeted ads—found themselves locked out of the ecosystem. It wasn’t just about crime. It was about control. Who gets to decide what privacy is allowed in crypto?
Today, Tornado Cash is still live on Ethereum. You can still use it. But if you’re in the U.S., you’re risking fines. If you’re outside the U.S., you might still get flagged by exchanges. The debate isn’t over. Privacy isn’t a feature you turn on or off—it’s a right. And in crypto, that right is still being fought over. Below, you’ll find real stories, deep dives, and warnings about what happens when anonymity meets regulation. Some posts are about tokens that vanished. Others are about exchanges that got banned. All of them tie back to one question: In a world where every transaction is public, who gets to stay hidden?
