Tornado Cash is a non-custodial Ethereum and ERC20 privacy solution based on zkSNARKs. It improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between recipient and destination addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts ETH deposits that can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever ETH is withdrawn by the new address, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit, ensuring complete privacy.
To make a deposit user generates a secret and sends its hash (called a commitment) along with the deposit amount to the Tornado smart contract. The contract accepts the deposit and adds the commitment to its list of deposits.
Later, the user decides to make a withdrawal. In order to do that, the user should provide a proof that he or she possesses a secret to an unspent commitment from the smart contract’s list of deposits. zkSnark technology allows that to happen without revealing which exact deposit corresponds to this secret. The smart contract will check the proof, and transfer deposited funds to the address specified for withdrawal. An external observer will be unable to determine which deposit this withdrawal came from.
You can read more about it in [this medium article](https://medium.com/@tornado.cash.mixer/introducing-private-transactions-on-ethereum-now-42ee915babe0)
Tornado.cash protocols, circuits, and smart contracts were audited by a group of experts from [ABDK Consulting](https://www.abdk.consulting), specializing in zero knowledge, cryptography, and smart contracts.
During the audit no critical issues were found and all outstanding issues were fixed. The results can be found here:
**Note**. If you want to reuse the same verifier for all the instances, then after you deployed one of the instances you should only run 4th or 5th migration for ETH or ERC20 contracts respectively (`--f 4 --to 4` or `--f 5`).
1.`npm run build` - this may take 10 minutes or more
1.`npm run migrate:kovan`
1. Take `ETHTornado's address` address from the output and set it as `HELPER_INSTANCE` in `./migrationDeposits.js`
1. Go to `./migrations/4_deploy_eth_mixer.js` and change `const ETHTornado = artifacts.require('ETHTornado')` to `const ETHTornado = artifacts.require('MigratableETHTornado')`
1.`npm run migrate:mainnet`
1. Take `ETHTornado's address` address from the output and set it as `NEW_INSTANCE` in `./migrationDeposits.js`
1. Setup right `SOURCE_RPC` and `TARGET_RPC` in the `./migrationDeposits.js`
1. Go to `./migrationDeposits.js` at the line 141 (`// 3. Decide should we uncomment here`)