Ethermine, the leading mining pool on Ethereum (ETH), has not produced blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions since August 9. Yet Ethermine’s parent company is an Austrian company, so it is not dependent on US Treasury sanctions.
Ethermine no longer processes blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions
Ethermine, the largest miner of the Ethereum blockchain (ETH), has stopped producing blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions. At least that’s what on-chain analysis seems to show, and has been for over a week now.
Block 15306892, produced on August 9, would have been the last one containing a Tornado Cash transaction, produced by Ethermine. This change occurred the day after the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions.
It should be noted that Ethermine is not a solitary miner, but what is called a mining pool. This means that many independent miners pool their computing power to produce blocks.
This decision is all the more significant because of the importance of Ethermine in the ecosystem. If we refer to the last 24 hours, for example, the pool weighs 30% of the hashrate, which is more than double that of its main competitor.
A choice subject to discussion
Ethermine’s choice to stop processing blocks containing transactions related to the Tornado Cash smart contract raises several questions.
First of all, it is not certain that this measure reflects the opinion of all the participants of the pool. But more importantly, Bitfly Gmbh, the parent company of Ethermine, is based in Vienna, Austria. This means that it does not fall under the jurisdiction of OFAC, which is only supposed to have influence in US cases.
This echoes another news item this week about Vitalik Buterin. The latter expressed himself in favor of a burn of the ETH of the validators of the Beacon Chain, who would choose to follow the various sanctions of the regulators. Indeed, if the actors in charge of securing a network start to choose which block to validate or not, it goes totally against the principles of decentralization.
On the side of the Tornado Cash smart contract, we can see that since the beginning of the sanctions, the number of transactions interacting with it has considerably reduced.
Since August 8th, we can indeed note that the daily transactions are barely exceeding 250. This could well mark the end of the protocol, because fewer transactions mean easier tracing of the source during any investigation.
