Deposit growth on Tornado Cash in March 2024
On March 18, 2024, abnormal deposit activity was seen on Tornado Cash. 23.4 million dollars ( 6800 eth ) was deposited. The last time a similar increase in deposits on Tornado Cash was seen was in 2022, before the project was placed on the OFAC sanctions list. The ETH deposited on March 18 became the first deposits of more than $10 million in a single day since the implementation of sanctions against Tornado Cash in August 2022.
Deposit analytics :
So what contributed to the abnormal deposit growth on March 18, 2024?
Most of the deposits were taken over by hackers who hacked the Heco Bridge crosschain back in 2023 and started money laundering as early as March. The majority of transactions on Tornado Cash fell on March 18 ( 5400 eth with 6800 eth for the whole day ). Within 8 days hackers have laundered about $145 million.
Upon further investigation, we also noticed transactions related to the Bo Shen hack, amounting to 600 eth ( ~ $2.1m ), with the remaining 800 eth shared by other smaller black market participants.
HTX/HECO — transactions Heco Bridge
Are sanctions against Tornado Cash not working?
Since the sanctions were imposed in August 2022, transaction volume in Tornado Cash has dropped significantly. Tornado Cash is a decentralized application, which makes it resistant to censorship and sanctions, which freely continues to operate on the darknet and having its own mirror sites lets hundreds of new depositors through every month.
Depositor analytics:
Despite the sanctions and arrests of developers, Tornado Cash continues to work and accepts more and more new volumes of assets for withdrawal (wash).
Use of materials:
Dune Analytics: https://twitter.com/obchakevich_ and https://twitter.com/tayvano_
( https://dune.com/obchakevich/hacked-analytics )
( https://dune.com/tornado_cash/tornadocash-2022-2024-stats )
( https://dune.com/tayvano/tornado )
( https://dune.com/hildobby/tornado-cash )
Etherscan:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xd90e2f925da726b50c4ed8d0fb90ad053324f31b
https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x454249291af33ad5681ed07dfd5165c1cb1aa625
