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 Active users (daily) Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Tornado Cash daily active users (DAU) metric measures the number of unique addresses that withdraw funds from Tornado Cash privacy pools on any given day. This metric captures user engagement with Tornado Cash's privacy-preserving services across multiple blockchain networks. The calculation identifies distinct wallet addresses that successfully withdrew funds from various Tornado Cash pool contracts, providing insight into the protocol's daily user activity.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on the following raw data sources:
- **Tornado Cash withdrawal events**: Parsed `Withdrawal` events from Tornado Cash pool contracts across seven blockchain networks
- **Multi-chain coverage**: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon networks
- **Pool variety**: Multiple token pools including ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, WBTC, AVAX, BNB, XDAI, and MATIC pools with various denominations
- **Blockchain transaction metadata**: Block timestamps and transaction hashes for temporal aggregation
- **Chain availability data**: Data quality filters to ensure reliable metrics within known data coverage windows

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: User interaction extraction
- **Purpose**: Identify all user addresses that withdrew funds from Tornado Cash pools
- **Logic**: Collect `Withdrawal` events from all Tornado Cash pool contracts across supported chains. Each withdrawal event contains a `to` field representing the recipient address of the withdrawn funds. The system processes pools of different token types and denominations, including ETH pools (0.1, 1, 10, 100 ETH), stablecoin pools (100, 1000, 10000, 100000 units), and native token pools specific to each chain. All recipient addresses are classified as 'Transactor' user types since they're actively engaging with the protocol by withdrawing funds.
- **Key fields**: Block timestamp (`block_timestamp`), recipient address (`to`), transaction hash, and chain identifier

### Component B: Data standardization and classification  
- **Purpose**: Normalize user interaction data with consistent metadata across all chains
- **Logic**: Each withdrawal event is tagged with standardized metadata including chain name, market sector classification ('infrastructure'), business segment ('other'), and user type ('Transactor'). The system maintains consistency across different blockchain networks and pool contracts while preserving the core user address and timing information needed for daily aggregation.
- **Key fields**: Chain identifier, user type classification, market sector, business segment, and user address

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All standardized withdrawal events from across chains are combined into a unified dataset
- **Time aggregation**: Block timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries, creating distinct calendar days for aggregation
- **User counting**: The system counts distinct user addresses per day, ensuring that users who make multiple withdrawals on the same day are counted only once
- **Chain availability filtering**: Results are filtered based on each chain's known data availability windows to ensure metric reliability
- **Final calculation**: The daily active user count represents the number of unique wallet addresses that withdrew funds from any Tornado Cash pool contract on each calendar day across all supported blockchain networks

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

Unique revenue-generating users over a fixed 24-hour window.

Tornado CashTORN

Active users (daily)

Active users (daily)

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown