Hi guys, I’m glad you tuning in with me today. Hope you’re having a fantastic day, and we’re going to be talking about. Anonymous ethereum transaction. So if you’ve ever wanted to be able to send funds from one address to another address without anyone being able to track these funds, then this video’s for you because I’m going to be introducing you the project tornado cash.
I’ll also be showing you how you can actually perform some anonymous transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. If you have excited for that, then. Smash the like button and sit back and relax and enjoy the video.
My name is Kierin and I created decentralized finance, and crypto videos to make sure that you are ready for the next bull run.
So let’s talk about private transactions on ethereum as you might already be aware.
As soon as you perform a transaction on the ethereum blockchain, as long as someone has either senders wallet address the transaction ID or the receivers wallet address then he can just look at the complete history of all of these accounts involved.
So through the years, many different blockchain projects have been trying to achieve this complete privacy when sending transactions. And there are projects such as zcash and Monero who actually achieved this privacy.
But there hasn’t been any successful projects on the ethereum blockchain that allowed complete privacy when sending eth from one address to another address, and that’s where it’s a tornado cash comes into play. A very exciting defi project.
How does tornado cash achieve complete privacy when sending transactions on the Ethereum blockchain? Well, Basically in a nutshell, what it does, it breaks the on chain link between a sender and receiver.
Normally when you’re performing a transaction on the ethereum blockchain, you send a transaction from your ethereum wallet to another one, and you’ve got the transaction ID, and this link, which links both gets broken. That way there’s no way to connect the withdrawal to the deposit. It’s completely anonymous.
So the way that these transactions work, it starts with the user generating a secret note, and the content of the note is transformed into a hash. And this hash is sent, which is also known as a commitment. So after the user has deposited his funds to this smart contract and has generated his secret note. He will want to withdraw at a later period of time.
Now we’re asked to do as he goes onto the tornado cash website with his secret note to prove that he is the owner of these funds, and then he adds a secret note, and thanks to the zero knowledge Snarks technology. The smart contract is going to be able to connect the secret note with the allocated funds without actually showing from where these funds are coming from.
And I think that’s very, very powerful and that’s what actually makes this whole transaction completely anonymous. So the anonymity set is basically a pool of all the deposits that haven’t been withdrawn until now. And the larger this pool is, the more private your transaction will be. Because after you have deposited your eth into the smart contract, when you want to withdraw this Eth.
That Eth will be taken from, many different addresses in the anonymity pool. When you want to withdraw your eth from the smart contract, you’re going to have two options. You can either use an ethereuml wallet to connect to the tornado cash website, or you can use a relayer and why being able to use a relayer is important.
I’m going to explain to you right now. If you want to have complete anonymity with a new ethereum wallet your not going to have any ether on it, and without any ethere you won’t be able to pay for the smart contract when interacting with the tornado cash website. And that’s where the relayer comes into play.
Thanks to the relayer. You’re going to be able to pay for the fees with your deposit. What you need to do is create this deposit create a new ethereum wallet and thanks to the zero Snarks technology and your proof, you’ll be able to send the transaction from the existing wallet to a completely new ethereum wallet.
So I think this is the best and probably the only way at the moment to be able to send a hundred percent anonymous transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. But there are a few more tips that you can use to increase your security even when using the relay option is very important to keep the common internet practice in the back of your head, like using a VPN or maybe even Tor to hide your IP address.
Furthermore, you also have to clear all your cookies from other decentralized finance apps because cookies can track your browser information. Then afterwards, the note, the secret note that you have, you should delete it, destroy it after you have completed the transaction. Because with this note, if someone should get a hold of this note, they can actually track from where the funds are coming from.
Time is also very important. So after you have deposited some funds into the tornado cash or website. You should definitely wait a few hours, if not a few days before withdrawing the funds, because if you withdraw the funds right away, it’s possible to determine from where the funds are coming from, just based on the amount of Eth that has been deposited and withdrawn.
So on the 10th of May, tornado cash has become completely trustless and unstoppable because the founders have destroyed the private keys to change the smart contract. So I’m on the tornado cash website and I’m going to show you how you can perform a completely anonymous transaction using tornado Cassius smart contract.
Now, before you actually attempt this yourself, please be aware this is still a new project with all new smart contracts you never know what can happen. There might be so some smart contract bugs, so you still have to remain cautious when using large amounts. Me personally, I’m just going to be using one eth in this transaction.
but I’m aware of the risk. So I’m using the PORTIS wallet. I’ve got about one eth on my wallet. You’re going to have to need a little bit more eth than the amount that you’d like to send to be able to pay for the smart contract. So go back to the tornado cash website, and I’m going to send 0.1 eth to another ethereum wallet.
So click on 0.1 and then click on a deposit. Tornado cash is going to create a secret note. And this secret note, I’m going to have to copy and save in a secure location. So I’m going to paste that. And then I double check that it’s correct, and then I click on the check box that I backed up the note and I click on sense deposit.
Okay, so I quickly checked this information and yes, the network fee is going to be a lot higher than when sending a normal, ethereum transaction, because you’re going to be using smart contracts and they are typically more expensive. So I’m happy with that and I click on confirm. So now that you’ve done your deposit, when you scroll down, you see the information about your deposit, the amount of time that has passed amount.
The transaction that has passed and the status. You’ve also got the note which you would delete afterwards. So now typically what you want to do is wait 24 hours before you actually start withdrawing these funds. You want to wait until they’re at least a few deposits between your deposit and when you start withdrawing from the anonymity set.
But for demonstration purposes, I’m going to show how you can actually start withdrawing without waiting these 24 hours. So click on withdraw. And here you’re going to paste your secret note and the tornado cash website is going to check your note and as you can see, we’ve got a few warnings and that’s because not enough time has passed and also there hasn’t been any subsequent deposits.
We’re going to ignore these warnings because this is just a demonstration. Now what you can also do is you can click on that this settings option. And here the default is using relayer that means you’re going to be paying the transaction fees with your deposit and not with any funds that should be on your new wallet.
And that is very important because if the wallet is empty, no one can actually track based on maybe funds that you sent from a previous time. You can also see the costs that you will have to pay. You’ve got the gas price, you’ve got the network, and also the relayer fee that you will have to pay. So that’s an order to use the relay your service for complete anonymity.
Now the last thing that you want to do is paste. You’re completely new ethereum address into the recipient address, I’ve copied my address and I paste it in here with all that done hour, click on with draw. This is probably going to take a while for the smart contract to generate the proofs and proceed with the withdrawal.
Alright, so tornado cash smart contract has now processed my input and they receive a withdrawal confirmation with the information. Use your knowledge, not proof has been successfully generated. Please click confirm to initiate the withdrawal. Now I can start withdrawing the funds from the tornado cash anonymity pool.
So I click on confirm. And the transaction was successfully sent. If I scroll down here is the new transaction, the transaction hash and it’s rating for receipt. It might take a few seconds or even a few minutes to actually be sent to the new wallet. My ETH withdrawal went through as you can see here the status is spent and I’ve got transaction hash.
So here we’ve got etherscan open. You can see all the information of the transaction, but you won’t see from where the funds are coming from. And the interesting part is looking at the contract, what it is actually doing, where’s transferring funds, and from where it’s actually taking a part of the deposit.
But with this way, it’s actually completely anonymous. So now the last step that you want to do is you go back to the tornado casual website. And you click on the bin icon to delete it. But only do that if you have spent your deposit. Because if you delete this, note, and you haven’t spent your deposit, then your funds are lost forever.
There’s no way to recover these funds. So that’s very, very, very, very important to realize. That was today’s video. Hope you enjoyed this short introduction to anonymous transactions on Ethereum blockchain. With that said, I wish you a fantastic day. I will see you in the next video. Bye bye.
