Technology and Development Update
Cardano’s Upcoming Vasil Upgrade
U.Today reported today that 33% of Cardano’s nodes have been upgraded to version 1.35.3 which was released on August 11, 2022. The Vasil hard fork will have a green light once 75% of stake pools have upgraded to 1.35.3. Cardano developers and even founder Charles Hoskinson are confident that this version will introduce the hard fork.
24.68 billion ADA (Cardano) are currently being staked. The Vasil hard fork will bring significant performance upgrades and should also lower transaction fees. The average transaction fees on the blockchain are already well under $1, usually around 0.16 $ADA or a few cents. Smart contract functionalities will be improved but puts more focus on scaling and network/ledger optimization. The Alonzo era/update introduced smart contract support for the platform in September 2021.
Johns Hopkins University Professor Will Preserve the Tornado Cash Source Code
Professor Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins just uploaded the Tornado Cash source code onto a github repository to continue teaching the concepts within the code. Green is an associate professor of computer science and a member of the university’s Information Security Institute. According to the university’s faculty page, his research includes techniques for privacy-enhanced information storage, anonymous payment systems, and bilinear map-based cryptography. Green is also one of the creators of the Zerocash protocol used by Zcash.
Github ultimately censored or removed the original source code to Tornado Cash; Green believes that this was likely part of a risk-mitigation procedure in reaction to the OFAC order. Green reuploaded the code to the same platform since GitHub is the most widely used software distribution website and believes that the platform shouldn’t have any issues with the code being up for non-deployment purposes. He does assure followers that he has offline copies of the source code, should GitHub take this down.
In my work as a researcher and instructor at Johns Hopkins, I've made extensive use of the Tornado Cash and Tornado Nova source code to teach concepts related to cryptocurrency privacy and zero-knowledge technology. My students have built amazing projects from the code. The loss or decreased availability of this source code will be harmful to the scientific and technical communities.
Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on August 8, 2022. The service provided a virtual currency mixer which was used to launder over $7 billion USD worth of crypto since its release in 2019. While the mixer was used for malicious acts, it introduced many privacy and animosity related concepts and potential enhancements to blockchain technology.
