Every payment on a public chain stays there forever.
The tools to read it get better every year.
What you sent in 2017, AI can read in 2030. Unless it was monero:native .
Zcash was supposed to be the "privacy beta."
Turns out the beta has backdoors.
for that monero:native is the only one
Ledger theft, day two. Since yesterday the thief has pushed ether through Tornado Cash three times, and each time on into Zcash's shielded pool. We followed every lot out the far side. Here is how, step by step.
1. THE SAME BUILD, THREE TIMES
An ether wallet pays a fresh splitter. The splitter pays four fresh wallets. The four drop it into Tornado Cash's 100, 10 and 1 ETH pools. Minutes, every time.
Run 1, yesterday 15:17: 1,254 ETH. Run 2, today 09:42: 1,291 ETH. Run 3, today 11:56: 450 ETH from 0xfa4EaBB840A33C156E600311433AE261CBfCb0e2, in the pools by 12:15.
2. OUT OF TORNADO CASH
The mixer breaks the link between a deposit and a withdrawal. We do not need the link. Our tooling fingerprints the withdrawal transactions themselves: how each one is constructed, who constructs it, and when.
Yesterday's 65 withdrawals (1,084 ETH) and today's 96 (1,726 ETH) all carry the same signature. The six other withdrawals from those pools in today's windows do not. Run 3 came out from 12:18 into 0x0d697aa182801566d87adc86e68e95fd3b2f5f82 (213 ETH) and 0x676b16cc18542f37d202a1a79ac05463395496a4 (122 ETH), and 195 ETH of it was inside a cross-chain swap service by 12:38. Forty-two minutes, end to end.
3. INTO ZCASH, AND OUT AGAIN
The swap service turns the ether into shielded ZEC, where sender, amount and recipient vanish. But the service's own shielding of each lot is public, and from it we derive a value signature for that lot's exit, then scan every transparent exit from the pool. 108 of 108 exits across both days match their lot to the zatoshi. Not one other exit from the pool does.
First lot today: in at 10:18:18, out at 11:06:16 in block 3512847 (8d26a9b095d4d28373527f7a6eb81a3be7f906d1e2190960c0512ff64f369418 and 738c6d1261e79766e4dd16bdbd38dced91b8e3a86ce41dcda83eda1f19208fbf), straight into a ZEC to USDC order.
Today so far: 20 lots ordered (2,379 ZEC, $2.9m), 14 out, 5 inside the pool, 1 still settling. Every exit feeds a ZEC to USDC order paying two wallets born at 11:11, 22 of the 28 paid by 12:43:
0x816D5Ee17DB1495d1409F135b98FF3edc5F3cDf8: 940,561 USDC
0xBA736A4b616e79867B6d586293966b552883f3F3: 852,258 USDC
1.79m USDC, unspent. @Circle can freeze it.
(1/2) 🧵⤵️
Talk is cheap. Here's the real test.
Exchanges kept delisting $XMR because they couldn't trace it. Regulators don't panic over coins they can already watch.
