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 Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

The TornadoCash revenue metric measures the total daily withdrawal fees collected by the TornadoCash privacy protocol across multiple blockchains. TornadoCash is a decentralized privacy protocol that allows users to make anonymous cryptocurrency transactions by depositing funds into pools and later withdrawing them through different addresses. The protocol charges withdrawal fees, which constitute its primary revenue source. This metric aggregates all withdrawal fees collected daily across supported chains and token types, converted to USD for standardized reporting.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on the following raw data sources:

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed TornadoCash `Withdrawal` events from seven different blockchains (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon), capturing fee information from withdrawal transactions
- **Multi-token support**: Events span multiple token types including ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, WBTC, AVAX, BNB, MATIC, and XDAI across various denomination pools (0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000)
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion across all supported tokens and chains
- **Token metadata**: Token decimal information for proper amount normalization across different token standards

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Withdrawal fee extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract withdrawal fee data from TornadoCash protocol events across all supported blockchains and token pools
- **Logic**: The system processes parsed `Withdrawal` events from TornadoCash smart contracts across seven blockchains. Each event represents a user withdrawal from a privacy pool and contains fee information in the `fee` field. The events are categorized by withdrawal type (such as `ETH01`, `DAI1000`, `USDC100`) which indicates both the token type and pool denomination. Each withdrawal type is mapped to specific token contract addresses for proper token identification. The system extracts key transaction details including block timestamp, transaction hash, log index, and the withdrawal fee amount.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `transaction_hash` and `log_index` for unique identification, `fee` for the withdrawal fee amount, `token_address` for token identification, and withdrawal type classification

### Component B: Daily fee aggregation
- **Purpose**: Group withdrawal fees by day, chain, and token type, preparing data for USD conversion
- **Logic**: Withdrawal fee events are aggregated on a daily basis by truncating block timestamps to day boundaries. The aggregation groups fees by chain identifier, token address, and maintains categorization by market sector and business segment. All fees within the same day, chain, and token combination are summed together to create daily fee totals. The system preserves metadata about the protocol version and business categorization for downstream analysis.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` truncated to daily boundaries, `chain_id` for blockchain identification, `token_address` for token type, `fees` as the aggregated daily amount

### Component C: USD conversion and decimal correction
- **Purpose**: Convert token amounts to standardized USD values with proper decimal handling
- **Logic**: The aggregated daily fee amounts undergo two critical transformations. First, token amounts are corrected for decimal places using token metadata, ensuring that amounts are properly normalized regardless of the underlying token's decimal configuration. Second, the corrected amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds that provide exchange rates for each token on each supported chain. This conversion uses the closing price for the day when the fees were collected, ensuring consistent valuation methodology.
- **Key fields**: `fees` converted to USD equivalent with proper decimal adjustment applied

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The USD-converted daily fee totals from all chains and token types are combined into a comprehensive revenue dataset
- **Currency conversion**: All amounts are expressed in USD using end-of-day exchange rates for consistent cross-chain and cross-token comparison
- **Time aggregation**: Revenue is calculated on daily boundaries, with each day's total representing all withdrawal fees collected across all supported TornadoCash pools
- **Final calculation**: The total daily revenue equals the sum of all withdrawal fees collected across all chains, tokens, and pool denominations, converted to USD and aggregated by day. The system applies chain availability filtering to ensure only data from supported chains is included and fills gaps with zero values for days with no withdrawal activity.

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

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

Tornado CashTORN

Revenue

Revenue

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown