There were 517,000 “token votes” in favor of the idea, but none against it.
Thanks to an unexpected suggestion made by the attacker, the people who own governance tokens for Tornado Cash will soon take back control over how the protocol works. With this change, the community can take back control and guide the protocol toward recovery and better security.
On May 26, the plan to give control of Tornado Cash back to the original users of governance tokens passed. There were 517,000 “token votes” in favor of the idea, but none against it. This settlement ends quickly a governance takeover that, luckily, didn’t affect the protocol itself but did lead to the theft of some governance tokens.
By taking over the governance system of the protocol, the attacker maneuvered a malicious proposal that got them 1.2 million votes. Using this large amount of voting power, they passed more plans and, in the end, took control of governance tokens that had been given to others. Their strategies allowed them to change the way the government worked, which gave them more power.
Just a few hours after the hack, the person who did it suddenly got in touch with the Tornado Cash community and made a plan that was supposed to restore governance control. Many people were surprised by this surprising act, which led to more questions about the attacker’s plans and goals.
Martin Lee, a data journalist at Nansen’s crypto analytics website, said that the attacker stole 483,000 Tornado Cash (TORN) coins. After that, they did a number of swaps where most of the stolen tokens were turned into 485 Ether, which is worth about $890,000. After this move, they had 39,000 TORN worth about $160,000. Part of the ETH was cleverly sent through Tornado Cash to hide where the money came from. This added another layer of privacy to the transaction.
Tornado Cash, an Ethereum blockchain-based crypto mixing service, caused much trouble when the US Treasury approved it in August 2022. The penalties were put in place because it was said that the protocol had been used to hide money.
