Yesterday (11/07/2023), the Tornado Cash community suffered a large-scale DDoS attack. The website https://tornado.ws was inaccessible, and both https://git.tornado.ws and https://forum.tornado.ws are still not functioning properly.
Ever since being sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury and Department of Justice, with its founder arrested, any interaction with Tornado Cash contracts is considered illegal. Major exchanges and RPC service providers have banned interactions with Tornado Cash contracts. As a result, Tornado Cash’s transaction volume has dropped by 90%.
Tornado Cash is now governed by a DAO. The cause of this attack may be attributed to a junior developer called Butterfly Effect (or possibly a disguised malicious developer) who deployed an incorrect proposal contract #32. This led to the direct loss of collateral for several major Tornado Cash relayers, resulting in a loss of $30,000 to $60,000. Butterfly Effect claimed to compensate for the issues caused by the previous contract by submitting a new proposal #34, which introduced unnecessary operations and triggered a crisis of trust within the community. Shortly after, the only official developer, Theo, announced his resignation from direct involvement in Tornado Cash maintenance due to health reasons.
A few hours after Theo’s resignation announcement, the large-scale DDoS attack began, targeting all tornado.ws websites and related Telegram groups.
The main Tornado Cash website, https://tornado.ws, was quickly restored by Theo. However, during this time, scammers spread phishing websites in the Telegram groups. The most frequently received phishing link was https://tornado.foundation. Telegram groups were then flooded with numerous join requests, and shortly after, the post-sanction English group was closed by Telegram officials. The Chinese group also experienced a flood of join requests from bots, but for now, there doesn’t seem to be a risk of the Chinese group being closed. The Chinese group mainly consists of TORN token holders, many of whom went from holding $100 worth of TORN to just $3. They still hold hope for TORN’s price to recover.
The entire Tornado Cash team has been targeted by the US government, but they left behind a governance mechanism that allows the Tornado Cash community, through holding TORN tokens, to govern it without any owners. The smart contracts of Tornado Cash continue to function despite being deemed illegal by the US government. Thus, the story of Tornado Cash continues.
Latest torndao cash RPC and website link：
https://mainnet.chainnodes.org/d692ae63-0a7e-43e0-9da9-fe4f4cc6c607