Tornado Cash becomes trustless

The Tornado Cash project team announced that all the code has become trustless and immutable. 

As can be read from the release, the addresses for changing the smart contract have been replaced and set with the famous Ethereum black hole, which means no one will be able to modify or access the various smart contracts used to provide privacy to their users. 

This decision consolidates the concept of “Code is Law“, i.e. that the code sets the rules and whoever makes a mistake pays the consequences, a clear reference to what happened with “The DAO” hack. The idea is that nobody can recover or modify possible errors in the code.

Clearly, while no one will be able to modify smart contracts anymore, it’s also true that it won’t even be possible to fix after-effects of bugs, even though the team has done its best to make the platform secure with a code audit, so as to limit the problems that could arise.

In any case, users are invited to cover their funds with insurance. 

In addition to the decentralization of the code, Tornado Cash has also decentralized the website using the IPFS protocol (reachable at this address) because, as the team itself points out, the main website may not be available in some countries. 

The post concludes by talking about the decentralization of the relayers that can now launch their own node following the instructions provided by the Tornado Cash team.

In the future, developers intend to replicate what can be done with Zcash, but on Ethereum, and thus provide everyone with an additional level of privacy for transactions. 

This is another addition to the privacy landscape, whose importance has also been demonstrated by other blockchains, think of Litecoin with MimbleWimble or TRON who also wants to improve this aspect on its blockchain.