What's next for Tornado Cash - Part II

*Part I here: https://torn.community/t/whats-next-for-tornado-cash-governance *

March has been a great month for Tornado Cash, with on-chain deposit backups, the addition of new long-awaited pools and a passed proposal which will significantly lower the cost of updating the merkle tree hence effectively enabling anonimity mining.
Looking ahead of us, what’s next for Tornado Cash?
Making a list off the top of my head (let me know if you want me to add anything else):

I
Regarding moving towards a streamlined process for addition of new pools, Ethdev made an interesting proposal:
https://torn.community/t/a-meta-protocol-for-adding-new-token-pools/
Further discussion and voting would be required in relation to:

1. Whether the community endorses the proposal, or would rather proceed without adding a meta-protocol for new asset pools;
2. In the former case, further discussion and voting on how to best protect relayers to exposure to new assets’ excessive price swings (enabling possibility to manually opt in and out asset pools, or setting different percentage fees for different instances, or more laissez-faire approaches, etc)
3. Perhaps starting with FRAX as new deposit asset
   https://torn.community/t/proposal-to-add-frax-as-deposit-asset/

II
In relation to remuneration of KCRs (https://torn.community/t/remunerate-key-contributors-from-the-community/), community sentiment survey and voting on:

1. whether the community prefers a delegated multisig or an alternative batched governance.
2. in the former scenario, voting the members of a delegated multisig for KCRs remuneration (first of all checking whether TC devs or prominent external would be up for it).
3. voting for a budget concerning a reasonable and sustainable funding allocation as a % of montly TORN vestings, and most appropriate modality.

(III?)
A possible introduction of fees to use Tornado Cash has been requested a number of times, e.g.:
https://torn.community/t/fee-sharing-model-proposal/
https://torn.community/t/adding-mixing-fees-and-ditributing-them-among-token-holders/
https://torn.community/t/make-proposal-for-token-holders-stakers-to-receive-a-of-fees-generated-from-the-platform/
I have expressed some reluctance in the past about this as I didn’t feel particularly in a rush about it, but would there be further requests for the community, this decision would need to be carefully considered and eventually voted in once some sustainable possibilities have been discussed, alongside technical aspects (e.g. adding an extra fee directly in the software run by relayers, or going for more convoluted ways).

IV
Discussion and voting on possible sustainable strategies to incentive genuine community participation to governance (e.g. rewarding addresses who voted in for at least one past proposal).
https://torn.community/t/incentivizing-governance

V
Community discussion and voting on the possibility of enabling anonymity mining on the DAI/cDAI/WBTC pools
https://torn.community/t/enable-anonymity-mining-on-dai-cdai-wbtc-pools

(VI?)
Community discussion on possible pro VS cons of a TORN pool
https://torn.community/t/torn-tokens-added-to-mixing

add TORN pool

I don’t really see first point as something that is urgent. We just added a HUGE number of new pools including DAI, CDAI and WBTC. It’s unlikely that there are other (decentralized) assets with enough users to create a reasonable anonymity set at this time.

I think the priority atm should be adding incentive for participation in governance. Either some kind of staking/reward tap for TORN tokens locked in the governance contract, or retroactively rewarding TORN addresses that vote on governance proposals, or both.

A one off airdrop to anyone who voted in any of the past proposals could be an interesting incentive to encourage future participation in the community indeed, by creating a precedent. My only concern is how to do this without setting up an environment of “governance participation farming” as we see in other protocols. Nevertheless, good topic to discuss - adding this to the first post. Thank you.

This has been already discussed and there were several objections about it, e.g. https://torn.community/t/torn-tokens-added-to-mixing. Most important concern would be the diminished anonimity of such pool.
Nevertheless, I’ll add it if the community comes out with some new favourable points / avenues about it.

I think it is too necessary to upgrade how to let Torn play his value price drop seriously affect the enthusiasm of absenteeism

There is no substitute for improved utility.
How should we expand in a future where the ORU economic zone of Uniswap v3 + DAI expands?
How can we make TornadoCash readily available to people in countries like Myanmar when they flee?

These are the kinds of questions we should be thinking about.

This could interfere with stuff like listings. It’s much simpler when TORN is a regular ERC20 and ETH/DAI is a privacy coin.

Wouldn’t this actually help with listings?
Most Centralized exchanges won’t list an ERC20 token that doesn’t have any utility, otherwise it could be considered a security.

Having TORN pools would give the token additional utility, which would help listing considerations, right?

wouldn’t it be fairly trivial to add new pools for TORN and have the community deploy them via the ceremony UI like we did for wbtc/dai/cdai?

How about using ETH/TORN LP tokens as a mixing target?
It would be more utility than simply including TORN tokens.
The downside, as others have pointed out, is that you get relatively less privacy.

**It would be nice if we could take advantage of the zk and participate in governance while they are in the mixing.

LP are better than single TORN, waiting specific plan.

I personally don’t like the idea of a torn pool at all right now.

The current utility of $TORN is governance voting, if people start locking up all their tokens how is tornado going to improve?

It’s too early for a TORN pool, as much as I would like to enjoy the pump and the mining rewards it’s not the right decision to make.

I would wait for the circulating supply to be at least 2x what it is right now to start discussing about a possible $TORN anonimity mining pool.

This was a brilliant idea and I honestly believe if there HAS to be some sort of reward for $TORN holders, this is the way to do it.

Agree with this!

A TORN pool for anonymizing TORN? THe way I understand the functionality is not to anonymize every token, but to anonymize a wallet holding ETH, (W)BTC, and a stablecoin DAI. The person can then use this wallet with no link to them to do their DeFi stuff as they see fit. The simpler the building block into the ecosystem, the better. Then other protocols can perhaps build on it as well.

I think that governance incentives are smarter - also to reduce the impact of fees for voting, at least until L2.

In several threads this idea of TORN pools keeps popping up. I think people are thinking short term to find a way to stop the dump. and even better a TORN pool with AP mining - it seems like a greed play.

But in the logic of the project “making ETH and the most important ERC20s anonymous”, I don’t understand how it makes sense.

I perfectly understand our current goal, however, I think you misunderstood the point of opening a torn pool. We have approximately 500,000 tokens released now, but looking at the voting rate. How many members actually participated and how many members actually cared. At least so far, more people are selling their tokens for profit rather than using Torn to govern our community. We should focus on engaging more people in our community and make it stronger, opening a pool wouldn’t be a bad idea.

I’m extremely confused.

If not enough people are interacting with governance right now, what is the point of opening a TORN pool and getting even less people to vote?

Keep in mind that TORN hodlers aren’t stupid, we have a long term vision and we like to support the project but if there was an option to make good gains, nobody would lock their tokens for days and pay for gas from their own pocket instead of locking it in a pool and generate passive interest.

I still strongly believe that if any, the only reward for $TORN holders should be for voting. or at least it should be like this until the supply is much higher than what it is now.

Alright, by the looks of it the community seems to be interested in discussing the possibility of a TORN pool, so I have added this in the initial post.

Nevertheless, I personally do not support the idea for the following reasons:

1. A TORN mixing pool would offer reduced anonimity compared to other pools; from a quality consistence point of view, this is a poor choice.
2. Making TORN more CEX friendly offers little benefit as each listing widens float, whereas you want to keep float tight if you want a token to soar into price discovery territory. Thereore, I see no benefit also from an economical / POS security point of view.
3. Increasing the allocation of TORN dedicated to such pool would remove supply of TORN available for its intended purpose i.e. govenrance, to the point of actually disincentive voting as there would be an opportunity cost associated to this. Thus, poor choice also for what concerns a community participation outlook.

All in all - significant drawbacks in multiple important areas, all for a small and predictable benefit. Not worth it.

Can we add new contract that reward holders who put TORN into governance? We doesn’t need anonymous torn mining by torn , just take part in this governance and gain reward like any other good project. We should consider about torn economy circle mode, it’s not short sighted but essentially safety for tornado.cash.

I do not see any benefit in creating a Torn pool. I agree with the idea of rewarding people who participate in governance.

Well, I’m not saying that we have to open a Torn pool currently. As I said, it’s just a potential way to attract more users participating in our community. Torn holders definitely have a long term vision rather than caring about short term price. But the reality is that more people are selling their tokens instead of holding it. If tokens are continuously sold off, how can we make the community better? Rewarding people for voting is a good way to encourage current torn holders,but in the long term,what we have to consider is how to let more potential users hold torn and participate in our community.