Tornado Cash exposure means your wallet sent funds to or received them from the OFAC-sanctioned mixer, directly or indirectly; Plastron flags both direct and one-hop Tornado Cash exposure free across seven EVM chains.

In August 2022, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Tornado Cash — a set of immutable smart contracts on Ethereum — as a sanctioned entity and added dozens of associated addresses to the SDN list. This was the first time OFAC sanctioned open-source software rather than a person or organization, and it created immediate compliance implications for every wallet that had ever deposited to or withdrawn from Tornado Cash contracts. Exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance immediately froze accounts associated with TC interactions. The challenge for ordinary users is that Tornado Cash was widely used for legitimate privacy reasons before the sanction — by people protecting their financial privacy, by DAOs managing treasury, and by protocol developers testing anonymity features. Many of these users had no idea that their TC interactions would later become a compliance liability. Beyond direct users, the problem extends to anyone who received ETH that passed through TC before reaching them: DeFi liquidity pools, yield aggregators, and anonymous P2P transactions all became potential vectors for second-hand TC exposure. Today, any wallet that deposited to, withdrew from, or received funds from TC-linked addresses carries exposure that is visible to every exchange running blockchain analytics. Knowing your exposure level before depositing to a regulated exchange is essential.