While Binance has announced the end of Tornado Cash’s TORN on its platform, the token has since seen its price halved. How is the protocol faring with all the difficulties it’s facing?
Binance to delist TORN from Tornado Cash
Since August 2022, cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash (TORN) has been in one difficulty after another since the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the protocol’s addresses.
In the wake of these events, the application’s TORN token appears to be undergoing a long agony, having lost almost 94% of its valuation since then, and recorded a 50% fall on Monday after the announcement of its delisting on Binance.
After said announcement, the asset fell from a daily high of $3.96 to $1.83 now, and now points far down the rankings at 1,223rd place for a capitalization of just $3.8 million.
According to Binance’s press release, trading pairs including TORN will thus be closed on December 7, and deposits will no longer be supported from the following day. In addition, users will have until March 7, 2024 to withdraw the remaining TORN from the exchange.
What’s happening with the protocol?
Despite the difficulties, Tornado Cash is still going strong. In terms of total locked value (TVL), DefiLlama’s data shows that across all blockchains, we’re back to mid-bull run levels of 2021, with $305 million:
Figure 1 – TVL present on Tornado Cash
The number of interactions with the protocol is similar. The drop is significant, however, with the number of weekly deposits falling from around 6,000 before the OFAC sanctions to just over 1,000 now:
Figure 2 – Weekly deposits on Tornado Cash
When it comes to withdrawals, we can also draw similar conclusions. All these data thus show that while Tornado Cash is not dead, it has nevertheless suffered a significant slowdown since the addresses of its smart contracts were placed on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.
Speaking of which, the Blockchain Association filed an “amicus brief” last week regarding the appeal lawsuit for which the plaintiffs are seeking to have the mixer removed from this SDN list:
Today we filed an amicus brief in the 5th Circuit appeal of Van Loon v. Treasury regarding OFAC’s sanctions against Tornado Cash.
Read Senior Counsel @MTCoppel‘s thread below for more. https://t.co/1pmSAt1Bds https://t.co/c5ScaTDr9N pic.twitter.com/e9ySvcKdeM
– Blockchain Association (@BlockchainAssn) November 20, 2023
Last August, Roman Storm, one of the co-founders of Tornado Cash, was arrested in the USA, while developer Alexey Perstev was released in April in the Netherlands.
