Eeep, samcszsun on Twitter is a blockchain security researcher that I follow on Twitter, and I make sure that I have notifications on for them. They are one of the best in the business, and when he tweets something... well, often it is earth-shattering... and not in a good way for the protocol that is being mentioned!

As we know, Tornado Cash had some problems with OFAC sanctions... and that will eventually play out in court. Eventually... but the gist of it was that the Tornado Cash smart contracts (the Ethereum ones, but nothing else!) were placed on an OFAC sanctions list... which meant that sending, receiving, or interacting from those smart contracts was a criminal offence.

This was a pretty hefty blow for the anonymising protocol... but there was a chance that things would still play out okay... and that it would fork or somehow survive.

Who would have thought that the death blow would come from a malicious governance proposal instead? So, what seems to have transpired was that a governance proposal was put to the vote... and people voted to pass it... and then through some interesting sleight of hand, a slightly different code was passed through. Now, as far as I understand, the actual proposed code was untouched, but it was the way that it interacted with something that wasn't in the scope of the vote that was malicious.

... and boom, that was the end of that. The DAO was hijacked and the attacker had access to everything! This is definitely a weakness of open source and decentralised protocols and software... sure, it means that everything is done in the open and visible... but lets be serious, how many of us are actually able to read, parse, and analyse code... and of those who are able, do they have enough time to do it? I would say no, and mostly no!

As soon as I saw that message, I jumped straight to Binance and dumped TORN. Sorry... I believe in the protocol and mission, but I'm not going to be holding the bag! I got in before the news got out, so I'm sort of happy about that.

Now, the twist is that the attacker has made a proposal to REVERSE the malicious governance takeover... is this a remorseful act? or an attempt to pump the price of depleted dex pools before dumping the rest of their magic tokens? Who knows... I'm not stepping back in! I think that this once valued project is now dead and buried...

... who knows, maybe this was an interesting government takeover to drain Tornado pools known to have North Korean money in them? I'm not sure which pools were affected... private ones definitely not, but others ones?

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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