Ethereum, Tornado Cash and transaction ownership

The Tornado Cash team has announced that they have released a new tool that allows users to generate a report on their Ethereum transactions by entering a note. 

Overall, the Tornado Cash platform is designed to provide an additional level of privacy for Ethereum (ETH) blockchain users, making it difficult to track transactions. 

With this new tool, the team has managed to integrate a system that allows verifying the ownership of a transaction and that all the details of the transaction have been generated by a specific person, considering that by adding the note it is possible to demonstrate its origin.

The use is quite simple: simply connect to the compliance page on the Tornado Cash website, enter a note and generate a PDF file that will contain the transaction report.

Moreover, this portal also allows verifying the authenticity of the note and entering the generated note in the PDF file, effectively checking the correspondence of the data entered.

Privacy yes and privacy no with Tornado Cash

 Some may complain that a tool that provides privacy shouldn’t provide a solution to undermine the result desired, but it is the team itself that reaffirms respect for the rules: 

“We believe in honesty and transparency. Therefore, we advocate that every privacy oriented solution implement helpful tools such as this. Allowing users to protect their privacy should not come at the cost of violating the laws, rules or policies of centralized exchanges or other centralized entities”.

It will thus be at the user’s discretion to disclose the note to others or retain it to prove ownership of a transaction, should any dispute arise regarding verification.

For example, a transfer of funds for a specific good or service for which the user does not want to disclose too much personal information: one party may take advantage of this and suggest that they have not received the payment, whereas this new feature of the Tornado Cash platform on Ethereum offers a solution.

How does Tornado Cash work

Tornado Cash is a non-custodial system, which means that the team has no access to any user data, such as seed or password.

Ethereum does not use the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model, but a system similar to traditional bank accounts. Essentially, all accounts send and receive both value and data transactions with each status change of the blockchain, contrary to what happens on Bitcoin.

This is why it is useful to use a mixer like Tornado Cash to make transactions more private.

In conclusion, it should be remembered that although the Tornado Cash platform offers the possibility to be used by everyone, it has an IP filtering system and American users cannot use it.