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Roman Semenov: Tornado Cash – Keeping Your Ethereum Transactions Private

Episode Summary

We were joined by Roman Semenov, co-founder of Tornado Cash, to talk about how the protocol works, how it was set up, community governance, and where he sees Tornado Cash's position in the quickly growing privacy ecosystem on Ethereum.

Episode Notes

By default, all transactions made on Ethereum are public. Tornado Cash is a decentralized privacy preserving solution built on Ethereum which adds privacy through obfuscation. Users can place Ether and some stable coins in prescribed increments [1 Eth, 10 Eth, 100 Eth...] into the Tornado Pool. In return, they are issued a private note, with which they can withdraw funds at a later time to a different address.

We were joined by Roman Semenov, co-founder of Tornado Cash, to talk about how the protocol works, how it was set up, community governance, and where he sees Tornado Cash's position in the quickly growing privacy ecosystem on Ethereum.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Roman's background and how he got into crypto
• The problem Tornado Cash solves and how the protocol works
• What tokens are supported and can you swap tokens?
• Smart contracts and zero knowledge
• Costs involved for deposits and withdrawls
• Weaknesses of the protocol
• The Compliance Tool feature
• The regulatory threat to private coins in the future
• Tornado Cash's roadmap and how they see themselves positioned in the wider ecosystem

Episode links:

• Tornado.cash
• Dune Analytics
• Tornado Cash on Twitter
• Roman on Twitter

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/395