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Are you at risk of Tornado cash Poisoning ?

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The Tornado Cash Unsettling events so far

Tornado Cash is an EVM compatible privacy protocol. Without going into the details what it does, here is what it does. It is quite opposite of what a public blockchain does. A public blockchain maintains a record or ledger which documents a transaction between a sender and a receiver of tokens or coins on that blockchain. A project like Tornado Cash does the absolute opposite. It erases the connection between the sender and the receiver.

What that does is a person can send crypto anonymously to the recipient as the senders address is hidden. Though such a service can have quite a few legitimate uses such as people have been donating anonymously to the Ukraine government without disclosing their identity. Tornado Cash can be used for transaction on ETH,USDC ,DAI etc. Basically any token or coin which uses an ETH address.

Tornado cash seems to be a hot favorite of hackers

It is believed that up to 30% of Tornado Cash transactions are on account of illegal activities.
Which means that it is one way that hackers use to mask their transactions.

US Treasury sanctions USDC and ETH addresses connected to Tornado Cash wallets

This was after the news circuited that Tornado Cash could be used by countries like North Korea and Iran to cover their crypto transactions and evade any sanctions.

The implications of the sanctions are grave

What these sanctions mean that any wallet address that is found interacting with a Tornado cash address would result severe consequences for the wallet holder these include

  • Up to 30 years prison sentence in USA and
  • A fine of up to 10 Million USD

The scope of this sanction

Any ETH wallet which have interacted with a Tornado Cash wallet address can be at the receiving end of this punishment.

Beware of miscreants at play

Some tornado cash users who are playing the part of bad actors are using this ruling to sprinkle tornado cash dust to well known account holders whose address are in common knowledge.

Those already targeted are wallet address of celebrities like
Brian Armstrong: CEO Coinbase Acts like these could make the implementation of such sanctions quite difficult and lives of legitimate crypto owners quite difficult.

Beware of Tornado cash Poisoning

On the other hand if your wallet has received even a fractional amount of crypto from a Tornado Cash wallet then you automatically come under the purview of these sanctions.

What could one do to prevent such exposure ?

Do not display your wallet addresses publicly on your social media profiles or from where it can be picked up and exploited.

Standard Disclaimer : The purpose of this post is not to scare the reader instead it is only help him/her protect their crypto funds. Please DYOR do your own research before making any crypto related decision. The purpose of this post is for education purpose only.