Ethereum Privacy Protocol Tornado Cash to Launch on L2 Arbitrum

Privacy protocol Tornado Cash is about to expand as it prepares to be deployed on ethereum’s second-layer network, Arbitrum.

Tornado Cash’s smart contracts are ready to run on the Arbitrum Layer 2 scaling network after the community contributed to ensuring the stability of the protocol.

The Nov. 29 announcement explained that deploying on Arbitrum will “allow users to take advantage of all the benefits a second layer has to offer, with cheaper transactions being the greatest comparative advantage.”

Tornado Cash is a fully decentralized Ethereum (ETH) mixing protocol. Tornado Cash masks the path of tokens like ETH from sender to receiver, providing fully private transactions without the need for privacy-focused tokens.

The second-layer network on Ethereum boasts faster transactions and cheaper fees, while still benefiting from the security and decentralization of Ethereum.

The Tornado Cash team believes that deploying to Arbitrum will allow more users to conduct private cryptocurrency transactions while avoiding the high gas fees of Ethereum. According to the team, L2 transactions are expected to be around 95% cheaper than L1 transactions on Ethereum.

In order to use Tornado Cash on Arbitrum, users must first send ETH, ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens from Ethereum to Arbitrum via the Arbitrum bridge.

Arbitrum is currently the largest L2 on Ethereum, with a total locked value of $2.68 billion, accounting for 39% of the L2 market share. This is second only to Boba Network's TVL of $1.38 billion, and according to L2Beat, Boba and Arbitrum are the only two L2s with a TVL of over $1 billion.

The number of unique addresses for Arbitrum has grown steadily since September, standing at 291,876 at press time. According to DeFiPulse, Tornado Cash has a TVL of $847 million.

As Cointelegraph reported, Tornado Cash launched its TORN governance token in December 2020 and airdropped them to users in February 2021.