Ethereum (ETH) is a public blockchain, where all transactions are freely available. This characteristic does not allow to protect the anonymity of users. Fortunately, the Tornado Cash protocol adds a layer of anonymity to the Ethereum network of the prince of cryptos.
Taking Anonymity On Ethereum to the Next Level
Tornado Cash is a protocol hosted on Ethereum. It aims to improve the anonymity of transactions on the network. Several anonymization techniques exist in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. For its part, Tornado Cash has opted for one of the simplest, yet radically effective designs: that of mixers.
In practice, a mixer is a pool into which users deposit funds. A mix is then made with all the deposited funds. Finally, the amounts originally deposited are returned to the depositors. This mechanism makes it possible to mix the funds of a large number of users to make it almost impossible to reconstruct the link between deposit and withdrawal.
Since its launch, the Tornado Cash protocol has seen over 96,000 different deposits. In total, over 2 million ETH and $4 billion in stablecoins have been deposited on the protocol.
Tornado Cash Announces The Launch of NOVA
On Wednesday, December 15, the Tornado Cash team announced the launch of a new service called Nova.
In practice, this service takes the form of an ETH pool with a series of new features.
First of all, this new pool removes the need to deposit a predefined amount by the protocol. Indeed, until now, the users could deposit ETH only by factor 10 (0,1, 1, 10 or 100). With Nova, it will now be possible to deposit arbitrary amounts.
“Therefore, if you want to put 0.4 ETH into the pool, you can do it in one go rather than making four separate transactions in the 0.1 ETH pool.”
Tornado Cash announcement
Secondly, Nova allows you to transfer funds without having to withdraw the funds from the protocol. Thus, the pool allows transferring deposited funds to another user, whose address is already known to the protocol.
Finally, Tornado Cash also announces the support of the second layer solution Gnosis Chain (formerly xDAI) to enable lower-cost transactions.
This update is also the perfect opportunity to announce the future deployment of version 3 of the protocol. This one should introduce atomic swaps between assets of the same pool as well as the addition of ERC-20 token pools and even NFT.
On its side, the Ethereum network has just known an update via the deployment of the hard fork Arrow Glacier. As a reminder, this one aims to push back the difficulty bomb, making mining obsolete.
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