Tornado Cash uses smart contracts that accept ETH & other token deposits from one address and enables their withdrawal from a different address. To preserve privacy a relayer can be used to withdraw to an address with no ETH balance.

Tornado Cash is a fully decentralized non-custodial protocol allowing private transactions on Ethereum and other adjacent blockchains. Tornado Cash was co-founded by Roman Semenov in 2019.

TORN token holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total withdrawal fees paid (revenue).

github

etherscan

Infrastructure

Tornado Cash

# Tornado Cash Average revenue per user (ARPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) measures the average daily revenue generated per active user of the Tornado Cash privacy protocol. This metric is calculated by dividing daily revenue (derived from withdrawal fees) by the number of daily active users (users who perform withdrawals). ARPU provides insight into the monetization efficiency of the privacy mixing service across different blockchains and token types.

## 2. Data sources

- **Tornado Cash withdrawal events**: Parsed `Withdrawal` events from Tornado Cash smart contracts deployed across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon blockchains
- **Token price feeds**: End-of-day token price feeds for ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, WBTC, BNB, AVAX, MATIC, and XDAI to convert fees to USD
- **Token metadata**: Token decimal information for proper normalization of fee amounts across different token types

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Withdrawal fee extraction
- **Purpose**: Extracts withdrawal fees from Tornado Cash privacy mixing transactions
- **Logic**: Collects parsed `Withdrawal` events from Tornado Cash contracts across seven blockchains. Each withdrawal event contains a `fee` field representing the amount paid to the relayer for processing the withdrawal. The system processes multiple denomination pools for different tokens - ETH pools (0.1, 1, 10, 100 ETH), stablecoin pools (100, 1000, 10000, 100000 for DAI/USDC/USDT), WBTC pools (0.1, 1 WBTC), native token pools for each chain (BNB, AVAX, MATIC, XDAI), and maps each withdrawal to its corresponding token contract address for price conversion
- **Key fields**: `fee` amount from withdrawal events, `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `token_address` for price lookups, `chain` identifier for multi-chain tracking

### Component B: Revenue calculation  
- **Purpose**: Converts withdrawal fees to USD and aggregates them into daily revenue
- **Logic**: Takes fee amounts from withdrawal events and applies decimal normalization based on token metadata to ensure proper scaling. Joins with end-of-day token price feeds to convert native token amounts to USD values. Aggregates all USD-converted fees by day to calculate total daily revenue across all chains and token types
- **Key fields**: `fees` converted to USD, `timestamp` truncated to day level, `chain_id` for chain-specific tracking

### Component C: User identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies and counts unique daily active users from withdrawal transactions
- **Logic**: Extracts the `to` address field from the same `Withdrawal` events used for fee calculation, representing the recipient address where withdrawn tokens are sent. Treats each unique recipient address as a "Transactor" user type. Creates distinct daily counts of user addresses, using HyperLogLog algorithms for efficient counting across different dimensional breakdowns including total project level, individual chain level, user type level, and product level
- **Key fields**: `to` address as `user_address`, `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `user_type` marked as "Transactor"

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Revenue data and user DAU data are combined through the ARPU calculation macro, which performs a division operation between the two metrics
- **Currency conversion**: All fees are converted to USD using end-of-day token prices before aggregation into revenue
- **Time aggregation**: Both revenue and user metrics are aggregated to daily grain by truncating timestamps to day level
- **Final calculation**: ARPU is calculated as daily revenue divided by daily active users, with a fill_zeros strategy applied to ensure complete time series data without gaps

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Tornado CashTORN

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Competitive landscape