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 Transaction volume Methodology

## 1. Overview

Transaction volume measures the total USD value of funds withdrawn from Tornado Cash privacy pools across all supported blockchains. This metric captures user activity in Tornado Cash's privacy-preserving infrastructure by tracking withdrawal transactions from fixed-denomination pools. The calculation aggregates withdrawal amounts from multiple chains and converts them to USD for standardized reporting.

## 2. Data sources

- **Tornado Cash withdrawal events**: Parsed `Withdrawal` events from Tornado Cash smart contracts across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Optimism, Polygon, and Gnosis chains
- **Token metadata**: Contract addresses and decimal information for supported tokens (ETH/WETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, WBTC, BNB, AVAX, MATIC, XDAI)
- **Price feeds**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion
- **Chain availability data**: Blockchain operational status information for filtering

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Withdrawal event processing
- **Purpose**: Extract and classify withdrawal transactions from Tornado Cash pools across multiple chains
- **Logic**: The system processes withdrawal events from 35 different Tornado Cash pool types across 7 blockchains. Each pool has a fixed denomination structure (e.g., 0.1 ETH, 1 ETH, 10 ETH, 100 ETH for Ethereum ETH pools). The system maps each withdrawal event type to its corresponding predefined amount and token address. For example, `ETH1_Withdrawal_event` maps to 1 ETH with token address `0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2` on Ethereum. Data cleaning removes 8 specific transactions that occurred during launch day where no tokens were actually transferred.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `transaction_hash` and `log_index` for uniqueness, `address` for the pool contract, predefined `amount` values, and `token_address` for the withdrawn token

### Component B: Metadata enrichment
- **Purpose**: Add business classification and chain information to each withdrawal record
- **Logic**: Each withdrawal record is enriched with standardized metadata including chain identifier extracted from the schema name, business line classification as "Privacy", market sector as "infrastructure", business segment as "other", version as "v1", and account name matching the pool type (e.g., "ETH1", "DAI1000"). The pool contract address serves as both account address and contract name.
- **Key fields**: `chain` identifier, `business_line`, `market_sector_id`, `business_segment_id`, `version`, `account_name`

### Component C: USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Convert token amounts to USD values using market prices
- **Logic**: The system applies the `convert_to_usd_and_correct_decimals` macro to convert withdrawal amounts from native token units to USD. This process uses end-of-day price feeds to determine exchange rates and applies appropriate decimal corrections based on token specifications. Since Tornado Cash uses fixed denominations, decimal correction is disabled as amounts are already in standard units.
- **Key fields**: `transaction_volume` converted to USD equivalent values

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All withdrawal records across chains and tokens are combined into a single dataset with consistent schema
- **Currency conversion**: Token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day exchange rates applied at the transaction level
- **Time aggregation**: Timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries using `timestamp_trunc(block_timestamp, day)` for daily aggregation
- **Final calculation**: The metric represents the sum of all USD-converted withdrawal amounts, aggregated by day, chain, and other dimensions. The finalization process ensures schema validation, handles missing data points by forward-filling with zeros, and applies chain availability filters to exclude data from chains that were not operational on specific dates.

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

Total USD value of transactions processed by the application.

Tornado CashTORN

Transaction volume

Transaction volume

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown