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 Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Tornado Cash fees metric measures the total withdrawal fees collected by Tornado Cash privacy protocol across multiple blockchain networks on a daily basis. This metric captures the revenue generated from users withdrawing their funds from Tornado Cash mixing pools, providing insight into protocol usage and revenue generation. The calculation aggregates withdrawal fees from multiple chains and token denominations, converts them to USD, and presents them as daily totals.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed Tornado Cash `Withdrawal` events from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC (Binance Smart Chain), Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon blockchains
- **Event schemas**: Multiple withdrawal event schemas per chain corresponding to different token types and denomination amounts (e.g., `ETH01_Withdrawal_event`, `DAI100_Withdrawal_event`, `MATIC1000_Withdrawal_event`)
- **Token support**: Withdrawal events for various tokens including ETH/WETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, WBTC, AVAX, BNB, MATIC, and XDAI
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: Token decimal information for proper amount normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Withdrawal fee extraction

- **Purpose**: Extract withdrawal fee amounts from Tornado Cash withdrawal events across all supported chains and token pools
- **Logic**: The system processes parsed `Withdrawal` events from 36 different event schemas across 7 blockchain networks. Each schema corresponds to a specific token type and denomination pool (e.g., 0.1 ETH, 100 DAI, 1000 USDC pools). For each withdrawal event, the system extracts the `fee` field which contains the fee amount paid by the user. The data includes transaction metadata such as `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, `log_index`, and the user's `address`. Each record is tagged with the appropriate chain identifier, token address, and pool denomination extracted from the schema name.
- **Key fields**: `fee` (withdrawal fee amount), `block_timestamp` (transaction timing), `address` (user address), `transaction_hash` and `log_index` (event identification), token addresses mapped to each chain and token type

### Component B: Daily aggregation and classification

- **Purpose**: Aggregate withdrawal fees by day and apply business classification metadata
- **Logic**: Withdrawal fee data is aggregated by truncating timestamps to daily boundaries using day-level time truncation. All Tornado Cash fees are classified under the Privacy business line, infrastructure market sector, and other business segment. The aggregation groups data by timestamp, chain, market sector, business segment, product, and token address to create daily fee totals for each token on each chain.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily boundaries), `chain_id` (blockchain identifier), `token_address` (token contract address), `fees` (aggregated daily fee amounts), business classification fields

### Component C: Currency conversion and standardization

- **Purpose**: Convert fee amounts to USD and correct for token decimal places
- **Logic**: The system applies USD conversion using end-of-day token price feeds matched to the appropriate date and token. Simultaneously, it corrects for token decimal places using token metadata to ensure amounts are properly normalized regardless of the underlying token's decimal configuration. This ensures consistent USD-denominated fee amounts across all tokens and chains.
- **Key fields**: USD-converted `fees` amounts, standardized decimal places based on token metadata

### Final aggregation

- **Combining components**: All withdrawal fee data is combined through union operations across the 36 different event schemas, then aggregated by day, chain, and token
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion uses end-of-day price feeds matched by date and token address, with decimal correction applied based on token-specific metadata
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are established by truncating block timestamps to day level, creating consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: The final metric represents the sum of all withdrawal fees collected by Tornado Cash on each day, converted to USD and aggregated across all supported chains and token pools. Gap filling ensures zero values are reported for days with no withdrawal activity, and chain availability filtering excludes data from unsupported time periods.

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

Tornado CashTORN

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown