When U.S. regulators moved against Tornado Cash in 2022, the logic was straightforward: disable a high-profile mixer and you choke off illicit flows. New data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) suggests that outcome didn’t hold. Instead, mixer activity has rebounded, and it’s ordinary privacy-seeking users — not criminals — who were most strongly affected by the enforcement push.
What the numbers say
- Total mixer transactions rose to roughly 32,000 in 2025, up from about 21,000 in 2024 and 16,000 in 2023, according to CCAF researchers Wenbin Wu and Keith Bear.
- Usage has climbed steadily since the U.S. Treasury lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash on March 21, 2025.
- Market share in 2025: Railgun — 71% of mixer volume; Tornado Cash — ~25%; Privacy Pools — ~5%.
A changing market landscape
Railgun’s surge reflects a market that adapted quickly. Unlike Tornado Cash, Railgun and Privacy Pools run mechanisms that screen deposits against lists of flagged addresses before funds enter the mixer. But CCAF notes an important limitation: blacklist-based screening can only block addresses once crimes are discovered and added to lists, leaving a dangerous lag during which newly tainted funds can still pass through.
Who was actually deterred?
The 2022 enforcement had an immediate effect: Tornado Cash’s daily transactions plunged by about 97% within days, and overall mixer volume dropped roughly 45%. But the impact was uneven. As Wu tells researchers, the sanctions “primarily deterred compliant users while illicit actors adapted” — shifting activity to other mixers, cross-chain bridges, and decentralized exchanges.
That shift shows up in deposit patterns. Before the crackdown, centralized exchanges (which enforce KYC) contributed a meaningful share of funds entering mixers. After the ban, those exchange-origin deposits largely disappeared. By 2025, 95% of mixer funding originated from unlabeled wallet addresses with no known entity ties — up from 76% in 2020. Another behavioral change: where mixer deposits once tended to occur more than 24 hours after a wallet’s creation, activity now often happens far sooner — a pattern CCAF links to users trying to avoid identification.
Privacy vs illicit use: the unresolved trade-off
Notably, the rebound doesn’t mean mixers are only used for illegal activity. A 2023 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis paper estimated that only about 30% of Tornado Cash traffic was linked to illegitimate sources, underscoring that privacy tools have lawful applications too. The policy tension remains: enforcement can push away legitimate privacy-seekers while illicit actors find new routes, creating a whack-a-mole dynamic rather than eliminating illicit flows.
Bottom line
The post-sanctions recovery shows that technical and market adaptations can blunt enforcement impacts, while whitelist/blacklist defenses leave windows for abuse. Policymakers face a difficult question — how to curb criminal misuse without driving ordinary users out of privacy tools — as mixers and their users evolve in response.
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