Nothing ‘unique’ about Tornado Cash as sanctions continue to pinch TORN

ambcrypto.com:

Can it be any worse for the already-troubled crypto-mixer Tornado Cash? Not just on the regulatory side, but even on-chain metrics have now revealed a depressing story. From monthly users to weekly deposits and withdrawals and much more…

Crypto-mixer Tornado Cash saw a significant drop in activity following the sanctions by the U.S. Treasury. Starting right from unique users on Dune Analytics, the drop was a significant one.

Data from Dune reveals a significant drop in unique users per week since the announcement of the sanctions in August 2022. In fact, the month of September saw unique users fall well below 100.

Source: Dune Analytics

This, indeed, is a sharp decline to say the least. From all-time highs in terms of unique users to potentially a permanent low.

Overall, monthly users fell by over 50% from over 2,600 in July to less than 1,000 the month after. This evidenced the >50% drop in users, as seen in the graph above.

Furthermore, when deposits and withdrawals on a weekly basis were looked at, a similar picture seemed to emerge. In fact, in the last week of September, weekly deposits and withdrawals amounted to $3.6 million and $5 million, respectively.

Source: Dune Analytics

These numbers basically went from amounting to $190 million+ in Q2 (for both segments) to the aforementioned numbers above.

Well, that’s exactly the case. Tornado Cash seems to have become the #1 destination for cyber-criminals looking to launder their ill-gotten funds. First of all, the platform had been used by the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus Group. At the time, the Treasury had said that Tornado Cash has been used to launder more than $7 billion since its creation.

That’s not all either, with the TransitSwap hacker using