Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash announces new upgrades

The development team behind Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based transaction mixing protocol, announced Wednesday the launch of an upgraded pool, dubbed Nova.

Nova, developers wrote in a blog post, is focused on "improving user experience & expanding the protocol functionalities," per a blog post published that outlines the changes. More broadly, today's announcement is intended to set the stage for a more significant upgrade, v3, though the timeline for v3 has not yet been made public.

Among the new functionalities is the capability to "deposit & withdraw arbitrary amounts of ETH," positioned as a privacy-boosting change to Tornado. "Up to now, all Tornado Cash pools had one thing in common: users could only deposit and withdraw a fixed amount of a given token within each pool. With the arrival of the Nova pool, this statement will no longer be true."

The Nova pool also allows for the use of shielded transfers of token deposits without needing to withdraw from the pool itself, and developers said that Nova will utilize the sidechain xDai Chain as a layer-two protocol for faster transactions. 

In the blog, developers stressed that Nova is currently in beta, with a limit of 1 ETH per transaction. "However, if the community wishes to increase this limit, the 1 ETH cap amount can always be changed through a governance proposal," they wrote.

Though the timeline for v3 wasn't disclosed, developers wrote that "[f]uture plans for the protocol include the possibility of making atomic swaps within a shielded pool, as well as a pool that will be able to support ERC20 tokens & NFT."