Binance listed Tornado Cash on its platform. Why’s that?

Binance announced that it would list Tornado Cash (TORN) on its platform today. The exchange will open trading for TORN/BTC, TORN/BUSD, TORN/BNB, and TORN/USDT trading pairs at 06:00 AM (UTC).

Tornado Cash is one of the largest decentralized, non-custodial privacy solutions built on Ethereum. It breaks the on-chain link between the source and destination addresses to improve transaction privacy. The company has launched its governance token TORN to give its holders additional advantages. TORN holders can vote to change the protocol and create proposals.

Tornado Cash became popular soon after its initial launch, and investors can already buy it on OKEx, Gate.io, HitBTC, LBank, etc. Binance joined the list of those platforms today, as well.

How does Tornado Cash work?

Tornado Cash uses a smart contract as the latter accepts both ETH and ERC-20 deposits. Users can withdraw these deposits by any on-chain address. According to the Tornado Cash team, whenever an asset is withdrawn by the new address, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit. Thus, asset privacy is guaranteed.

The company uses zero-knowledge proofs to achieve privacy. When a customer decides to make a withdrawal, they must provide proof of possessing a secret corresponding to one of the smart contract’s lists of deposits.

zk-SNARK technology makes it possible to verify this proof without the customer needing to reveal which exact deposit corresponds to their secret.

Afterward, the smart contract checks the proof, and if everything is correct, transfers deposited funds to the address specified by the withdrawal transaction. The whole of it works in such a way that any external observer won’t be able to determine which deposit this withdrawal is linked to.

TORN a fixed-supply ERC-20 token, and the platform uses it to enable its customers to vote on protocol upgrades and fixes.

The TORN token has a total fixed supply of 10,000,000. 10% of the supply is allocated to liquidity mining rewards (distributed linearly over one year), 5% to previous protocol users via an airdrop, 30% to founding developers, along with early supporters (unlocked over three years with a one year cliff), and 55% goes to the protocol treasury (unlocked linearly over five years).