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Story: Tornado Cash DAO Hit by Suspicious Governance Proposal Tied to Railgun Address

By Dan Saada

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What the Proposal Actually Does. On the surface, the proposal looks almost reasonable.

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The 2023 Attack Left Scars. It's worth remembering this isn't the first time someone tried to hijack Tornado Cash governance.

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Legal Trouble Isn't Going Away Either. The governance drama is happening alongside an unresolved legal situation that won't let the…

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A new governance proposal inside the Tornado Cash DAO is drawing serious alarm. Researchers flagged it fast — and the more they looked, the worse it got.

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L2BEAT researchers were among the first to call out the proposal, pointing to one glaring red flag: it references an unverified contract.

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On the surface, the proposal looks almost reasonable. It lays out a new fee structure and claims to bring a "dynamic deflationary economic model" to Tornado Cash.

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Pascal Caversaccio from the Security Alliance went further. He didn't just call it suspicious. He called it malicious.

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And there's a second problem buried in the proposal: it could zero out relayer balances across the network. Relayers are critical infrastructure for Tornado Cash users.

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Caversaccio has been direct: TORN holders should reject this proposal. Full stop.

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It's worth remembering this isn't the first time someone tried to hijack Tornado Cash governance. In 2023, a near-identical playbook played out.

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See also: $5.1 Million Hits Tornado Cash in 20 Transactions After jaredfromsubway.eth Exploit

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There were other incidents too. At some point, front-end interfaces for the platform were hit with malicious scripts that leaked sensitive user data to an attacker-controlled…

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The pattern here is pretty clear. Tornado Cash has been a recurring target, and the governance structure has proven vulnerable more than once.

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Storm's case probably matters beyond just Tornado Cash. How courts treat the developers of privacy protocols has implications across the whole sector.

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Back to the current proposal — the timing is what makes it especially suspicious. The proposer's wallet got funded by Railgun shortly before submission.

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