Tornado Cash governance may have one final job left. Vote itself out of existence.
Pseudonymous Ethereum security researcher pcaversaccio, who joined the Ethereum Foundation's board last week, is pushing a plan to permanently disable Tornado Cash governance after what could be one of its final protocol changes.
imho one critical missing piece for tornado cash to become more usuable on a _daily_ basis is having a 0.01 ETH pool. we could simply clone the existing working pool code, adjust for 0.01 ETH (only nit adjustments needed actually), and make a proposal to governance (so the pool…
— sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / (@pcaversaccio) August 7, 2026
- In an X post on Friday, pcaversaccio suggested creating a new 0.01 ETH Tornado Cash pool to make the privacy protocol more practical for everyday use.
- The pool could largely reuse existing code and be registered through Tornado Cash's official router through a governance proposal, the researcher said.
"And after this happened we dissolve TC governance 😉," pcaversaccio added.
A proposal designed to be irreversible
In July, pcaversaccio published code for a "terminal" Tornado Cash governance proposal designed to permanently prevent any new proposal from ever being submitted, voted on or executed.
The proposal hasn't been executed on-chain. If approved, however, the shutdown would be deliberately irreversible.
- The code would replace the existing governance implementation with a stripped-down version that removes functions used to create proposals, lock tokens, cast votes and execute governance decisions.
- It would then transfer administrative control of the governance proxy to the burn address, preventing the proxy from being upgraded again.
The proposal also includes on-chain checks designed to verify that both changes have taken effect before execution is considered complete.
Once executed, the documentation says, no future governance proposal could undo the change.
Some TORN would be trapped forever
Holders of TORN, Tornado Cash's governance token, who have tokens locked for voting would still be able to withdraw them through a new function.
Pcaversaccio has been explicit about what that would mean for the token.
In July, the researcher said in an X post that if the proposal is executed, "TORN effectively becomes a meme token," adding that "Tornado Cash governance must die."
Tornado Cash governance has already faced another attack attempt
Pcaversaccio's proposal comes after the researcher spent time reviewing Tornado Cash governance proposals and flagging potential security problems.
In July, pcaversaccio identified Tornado Cash Proposal 67 as malicious and urged TORN holders to reject it.
the latest tornado cash proposal 67 is _malicious_: https://bafybeie5hxovqc4ifcnrnhvmjbefxgeix6oqvzaspyytdxiyscji22v5pu[.]ipfs[.]inbrowser[.]link/governance/67
— sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / (@pcaversaccio) June 25, 2026
decompilation of the proposal: https://t.co/bfGfEkb1o3
the try to set the governance address to a vanity address that… https://t.co/rny5WWdd8M pic.twitter.com/0VbG4KO9Yc
The researcher's analysis found that the proposal attempted to substitute the legitimate Tornado Cash governance and staking addresses with visually similar vanity addresses controlled separately.
One function would have checked against the spoofed governance address, potentially allowing its controller to wipe individual relayers' balances.