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 Total value locked Methodology

## 1. Overview

Tornado Cash TVL measures the total value of tokens locked in Tornado Cash privacy mixer contracts across supported blockchain networks. Since Tornado Cash is a privacy protocol where users deposit tokens that remain locked in mixing contracts until withdrawal, TVL is calculated as the sum of all token balances held in official Tornado Cash contract addresses. The calculation tracks real-time balance changes from blockchain events, converts amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds, and aggregates across all supported chains and tokens.

## 2. Data sources

- **Token transfer events**: Parsed `Transfer` events from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon that affect Tornado Cash contract addresses
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: Daily USD prices for all allowlisted tokens used in TVL calculations
- **Token metadata**: Token symbols, decimal places, and contract addresses for proper amount normalization
- **Contract registry**: Hardcoded lists of official Tornado Cash mixer contract addresses for each supported chain

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Token allowlist definition
- **Purpose**: Defines which tokens are valid for Tornado Cash TVL calculations
- **Logic**: Maintains a curated allowlist of 14 specific tokens across 6 blockchain networks, including native wrapped tokens like `WETH`, `WBNB`, `WAVAX`, `WMATIC`, and `WXDAI`, major stablecoins like `DAI`, `USDT`, and `USDC`, plus `WBTC` and compound `cDAI`. This allowlist prevents spam tokens or invalid deposits from affecting TVL calculations
- **Key fields**: `chain`, `token_symbol`, and `token_address` for each allowlisted token

### Component B: Balance change tracking
- **Purpose**: Tracks daily token balance changes at all Tornado Cash contract addresses
- **Logic**: Processes blockchain token transfer events using predefined lists of official Tornado Cash mixer contract addresses for each chain. Ethereum has 22 contract addresses while other chains have 3-4 addresses each. The system tracks all inbound and outbound token transfers to calculate net daily balance changes for each token at each contract address. Uses incremental processing with daily partitioning to efficiently handle new transactions
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `chain_id`, `account_address`, `token_address`, `token_symbol`, and `balance` change amounts

### Component C: Cumulative balance calculation  
- **Purpose**: Converts daily balance changes into running cumulative balances
- **Logic**: Applies window functions to sum balance changes over time, partitioned by timestamp grain, chain, contract address, and token address. This creates a running total of how many tokens are held in each contract at each point in time. Forward-fills missing data points to ensure continuous daily time series without gaps
- **Key fields**: Cumulative `balance` amounts for each token at each contract address over time

### Component D: USD conversion and filtering
- **Purpose**: Converts token balances to USD values and applies token filtering
- **Logic**: Joins cumulative token balances with end-of-day price feeds to convert native token amounts to USD equivalents. Only includes positive balances and filters results to only allowlisted tokens. Multiplies token balance by corresponding USD price for each day, handling decimal normalization automatically through price feed integration
- **Key fields**: `amount` in USD, `timestamp`, `chain_id`, `account_address`, and `token_address`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sums USD-denominated token balances across all Tornado Cash contract addresses, tokens, and supported chains for each day
- **Currency conversion**: Uses end-of-day token prices to convert native token amounts to USD, ensuring consistent daily valuations
- **Time aggregation**: Calculates daily TVL by summing all positive token balances held in Tornado Cash contracts as of end-of-day
- **Final calculation**: Total TVL equals the sum of all USD-converted token balances held across all official Tornado Cash mixer contracts, representing the total value locked in the privacy protocol at any given time

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

Total value locked (TVL)

Total value locked (TVL) — value deposited into the project's applications.

Tornado CashTORN

Total value locked

Total value locked

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown