Tornado Cash Ported to MegaETH Testnet

The popular crypto privacy protocol Tornado Cash has been successfully ported to the recently launched public testnet MegaETH. This news follows the lifting of US sanctions against the protocol, making it legally accessible to US users again.

The development, originally reported by The Block, comes from developer Gunboats, who calls the modified protocol ETHTornado. According to Gunboats, the porting was simple as no changes in the code were needed. Gunboats reported the following:

“I thought, maybe someone should implement Tornado Cash on the most popular thing right now… and that turned out to be surprisingly simple,”

Sanctions lifting opens doors for Tornado Cash

The US Department of Treasury imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash in August 2022, due to allegations of money laundering and alleged ties with the North Korean Lazarus Group. The recent lifting of these sanctions now makes the protocol legal again for US users, although some platforms may still exclude the associated wallets from airdrops.

Gunboats downplayed potential legal complications surrounding this migration and expressed his support for Roman Storm, the co-founder of Tornado Cash, who is still dealing with legal issues. “Free Roman Storm,” Gunboats shouted out in support.

Despite the migration and renewed accessibility, Gunboats acknowledges that ETHTornado is still barely used, partly due to the lack of a user-friendly interface.

What is MegaETH and why is it important?

MegaETH, a new scaling solution for Ethereum (ETH), was launched on March 21 and claims to be able to process up to 20,000 transactions per second with block times of just 10 milliseconds. This makes it a promising Layer-2 solution.

MegaETH moves transaction processing away from the Ethereum main network but retains its security. It uses innovative technologies such as EigenDA and specialized sequencers to process multiple transactions simultaneously.

In addition to Tornado Cash, trading platforms GTE and Infinex are also running on the MegaETH testnet. This suggests that MegaETH is rapidly developing as a major platform within the Ethereum ecosystem.

The question remains whether ETHTornado will attract a significant number of users and whether MegaETH can provide a safe haven for privacy-focused crypto solutions.