4 Months After Sanctioned, Tornado Cash Community Passes "Reinvigoration Proposal"
Since OFAC announced sanctions against Tornado Cash in August, some middleware providers that provide services for Tornado Cash, such as Infura and Alchemy, have also been scrutinized, resulting in users being unable to access their assets normally, and can only complete the interaction by manually setting the node configuration of the wallet , but there is a threshold for such manual configuration, which seriously limits the number of Tornado Cash users. In addition, the official website of Tornado Cash has also been offline. Users who want to access the website now need to use the method of direct access based on the IPFS protocol. Ordinary users who do not understand the technology are likely to give up using it.
Those sanctioned by OFAC along with Tornado Cash also include all Tornado Cash developers and code contributors. Tornado Cash's GitHub has been deleted, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev has been jailed, and founder Roman Semenov's GitHub account has been deactivated. Therefore, while users will still have access to Tornado Cash, code updates and new developments cannot be made to it.
Moreover, OFAC has also made it clear that all applications similar to Tornado Cash will be sanctioned by the United States, which undoubtedly dampens the enthusiasm of most engineers to develop privacy protocols, and inevitably makes people worry about the future of privacy applications.
Before the sanctions, Tornado Cash used to be a central hub for crypto mixing services with great liquidity. However, weekly deposits and withdrawals to the protocol have both fallen by more than 90% since the sanctions were imposed.
It can be said that the current Tornado Cash is at a watershed. Whether to take legal risks to continue development, or to "stay" for the time being, this is a multiple-choice question that the Tornado Cash community is facing.
Recently, gozzy, a member of the Tornado Cash community, initiated a proposal, saying that he would assume the responsibility for the subsequent development of Tornado and continue to maintain related components of Tornado to promote community building and product development.But given gozzy's lack of assistance at hand, the complexity of Tornado's technology, and the high likelihood of legal risk. gozzy expects the community to pay him a base salary of $240,000 per year, which will be distributed through the Sablier stream at a rate of approximately $60,000 per quarter. The community also needs to publish a proposal every quarter to decide how much salary will be paid in the next quarter. In addition to salary information, gozzy also listed his work experience and the responsibilities he will assume. After three days of community voting, with 81% support, the proposal was finally passed.
The day after the proposal was passed, gozzy began to update users to use ENS and IPFS resolvers (http://3th.ws) to log in to the website, and released part of the Tornado Cash roadmap. As can be seen from the roadmap,gozzy's current priority is to restore Tornado Cash's frontend and repeater connections. In the future, we will update educational resources, participate in and accelerate governance, complete the expansion and development of the agreement, and so on.
Judging from the current feedback, the community is generally optimistic about gozzy's proposal. gozzy seems to be very interested in anonymous transfers and privacy security. He once built a censorship-resistant eth.limo (a privacy-preserving ENS gateway) replacement that can start a Tor hidden service for each ENS domain name pointing to IPFS content. That is, a website that protects user privacy. It’s all some pretty hardcore engineering and privacy technology that has helped Firn Protocol, an anonymous payment protocol, whose users can now use the protocol without censorship. This technology is also considered by the community to be beneficial to the entire Ethereum community.
In fact, this is not the first time the Tornado Cash community has rescued itself. Not long after Tornado was sanctioned, some community members suggested forking Tornado Cash and using the code of the protocol to create other variants of the service to further decentralize the privacy of users when using encrypted currency mixing services. However, this alternative version of the agreement has no way to improve liquidity, and it also cannot solve the risk of being sanctioned, so it is nothing.
Prior to this, an active participant in the Tornado DAO also proposed a proposal titled "Saving Tornado Cash: Formal Challenge to U.S. Treasury Department Sanctions."proposal. The proposal recommends that Tornado DAO raise funds on behalf of Tornado Cash and hire a legal team to fight the sanctions. It also calls on Tornado DAO to initiate a legal challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. But in the end, because it was "unable to compete with the United States" and the contributors were afraid of being sued and failed, the Tornado DAO was closed to protect the safety of community members.
It can be seen that the first two self-rescue results of Tornado Cash were not satisfactory. Although the adoption of this proposal has received strong support from the community, developers will still face sanctions and serious legal uncertainties. Will Tornado DAO continue to operate in accordance with the wishes of the community? This will be the next big challenge for gozzy and the entire Tornado Cash community.
