Tornado Cash DAO project shuts down permanently to keep team members safe

DAO of Tornado Cash has announced that it will be shutting down cryptocurrency project permanently in order to keep its contributors and team members safe. This is one important example of government being able to track and shut down a so-called decentralized project.

Also, we doubt the government would care much even if some internet / blockchain enthusiasts yammer about inability to use Tornado Cash to clean their Ethereum. Technically, since the smart contract is deployed on Ethereum blockchain, it cannot be fully banned, so you can still use Tornado Cash.

That said, any funds touched by Tornado’s smart contract will be tainted and you will not be able to use funds on any legit cryptocurrency exchange, especially the ones operating in the US.

Infact, at time of this writing, there is still whopping 163,000 Ethereum stored on Tornado Cash’s pools. This can be verified by visiting this etherscan link.

At time of writing of this article, Monero-Ethereum Atomic swaps are coming and it will be a game changer for privacy lovers. It will be very difficult to ban it as exchange is done without any intermediary like an exchange. So, the government will not be able to ban these Atomic swaps. They can always order US cryptocurrency exchanges to ban Monero (XMR) to prevent users from using it though.