Tornado Cash New Decentralized Relayers Network

With a brand new decentralized relayers network, Tornado Cash just added an awaited utility to its tool-belt pushing its decentralization one step further 💫

This article has been written by the WUTornado Team (ayefda & bt11ba)

📢 BREAKING (or not that breaking if you carefully follow Tornado Cash twists & turns) NEWS: Tornado Cash decentralized relayers network interface is LIVE & READY FOR USE!

This challenging project was led by Tornado Cash community. After months of brainstorming, heated discussions, several votes, analysis & audits, this new feature is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And so do Tornado Cash community members.

The protocol’s 10th on-chain governance proposal has resumed last few week-ends with a massive supporting consensus from the community. After such an electoral success, all smart-contracts materializing this proposal have been rapidly deployed.

💡 If you are not fluent in tornadoes, Tornado Cash is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) where all major updates to existing functioning have to go through on-chain governance. This governance takes the shape of proposals where TORN voters can either vote `Yes`or `No`. The voting period is 5 days & at least 25,000 TORN have to be used for voting to validate each proposal. If your curiosity is torturing you & you want to learn everything about Tornado Cash governance, we refer you to either the protocol’s documentation or this Medium article. Nothing prevents you from reading both if you are a man of culture.

Further decentralization will always be good news for a DAO (the “D” does stand for decentralization after all). As it’s common knowledge that good news never come alone, this relayers network isn’t only decentralized, it requires its members to stake a minimum of 300 TORN.
With this new-coming staking features, the protocol’s governance token will gain an additional utility to the greatest pleasure of all Tornado Cash community members & TORN voters.

“With these latest news, Tornado Cash is more than ever a protocol of the people, by the people, for the people.”
— Quote by Abraham Lincoln, 1863 (if the internet says it, it must be true)

Tornado Cash Decentralized Relayers Network UI

As of now, anyone can become a relayer. The only condition to be included on the preferred list is to hold min. 300 TORN & go through the newly released Decentralized Relayers Network UI. The amount of the minimum stake can be changed by Tornado Cash governance at all time (as long as the changing proposal gathers enough `Yes` votes, of course).

Relayers form an essential & necessary part of the Tornado Cash ecosystem. Their use guarantees privacy as they solve the infamous “fee payment dilemma” : how to pay gas fees for token withdrawals from a pool while maintaining anonymity? Therefore, relayers act as a third parties and take care of the whole withdrawal. They pay for gas fees by deducing them directly from the transferred amount. They also take an additional gas fee for their services.

With this new system, at each withdrawal, the protocol will deduct from the relayer’s staked balance through the `StakingReward` contract. This deducted percentage may vary from one pool to the other and is also subject to change through on-chain governance. It’s fixed at 0.3% for now and it can be changed at any time by a governance vote. However, some pools remain without deductions, either because the instance is too small to assign a deduction (0.1 ETH, 100 DAI/USDT, 1000 DAI/USDT) or because there is not enough liquidity on Uni v3 (all cDAI instances).
These collected TORNs will then be distributed across TORN voters, proportionally to their stake. Tornado Cash governance voters will both be able to actively participate to governance & get rewarded for their locked TORN.

How to Stake TORN?

Any TORN holder can lock their tokens into the Tornado Cash Governance contract to become a voter and earn a reward (proportionally to their stake).

On `Voting` section, then `Manage`, you will also have the ability to claim your rewards:

For more information on specific steps to lock your TORN tokens and claim your staking reward, a quite documented tutorial is available on docs.tornado.cash.

How to Become a Relayer?

Tornado Cash community developers released a new Decentralized Relayers Network UI(https://relayers-network.tornadocash.eth.limo/) to make the process easy & available to anyone who wants to join the network. As long as you meet the minimum amount of required TORN, this intuitive user interface will allow you to get registered as a Tornado Cash relayer in 6 steps & few clicks.
➡️ All the process is detailed on docs.tornado.cash.

Effects & Benefits

• 🌐 The relayers network pushes Tornado.Cash towards more decentralization. This fact will never be emphasized enough.
• ⭐️ This newly TORN distribution system will reward TORN voters. These voters are the community members that participate the most actively to the protocol’s governance, by voting on proposals & making possible the protocol’s continuous improvement & development.

Thank you for reading! 💚

Written by the WUTornado Team (ayefda & bt11ba)
Contact : wutornado@protonmail.com
Donation address of WUTornado Team: 0xEA27752f7D6687CB3Be2F180B997713b784c9911