Headline: Tornado Cash Soars to a Historic High of Nearly $1.2 Billion Amid Increased Whale Activity Translation: Tornado Cash Soars to a Historic High of Nearly $1.2 Billion Amid Increased Whale Activity

The total amount of deposits in the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash has reached a record $1.195 billion. According to DL News, the surge in the protocol’s TVL is attributed to an influx of funds linked to Richard Hart.

«It appears that several large whales are dumping everything into Tornado Cash,» commented Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at MetaMask.

Her analysis of on-chain data revealed that over the past few days, more than 20 wallets associated with the PulseX exchange have transferred over 116,000 ETH to the mixer. At current prices, this amounts to approximately ~$399.5 million or about a third of Tornado Cash’s TVL.

According to the SEC, Hart (whose real name is Richard James Schueler) controls PulseX, the PulseChain blockchain on which the platform operates, and the HEX project. In 2023, the regulator accused the entrepreneur of raising over $1 billion through unregistered cryptocurrency offerings involving these entities.

In March 2025, a court ruled that part of the SEC’s arguments against Hart were unproven. Subsequently, the agency decided not to file a new lawsuit.

Hart may have indirectly acknowledged the significant asset transfers identified by experts in a post on social media platform X published on November 5.

«This is what wallet watchers will be,» he captioned an image.

In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash. Authorities reported that since the service’s inception, criminals have funneled over $7 billion through it. Notably, the protocol was utilized by hackers from the North Korean group Lazarus.

All company assets, user funds, and source code were frozen, and U.S. residents and citizens were prohibited from using the service.

On January 21, 2025, a U.S. appeals court overturned the sanctions, citing «overreach» by OFAC and remanded the case to a district court in Texas for further proceedings. In April, a federal court barred the agency from renewing or imposing new restrictions on the crypto mixer.

On May 14, 2024, a court in the Netherlands convicted Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev of laundering $1.2 billion through the mixer and sentenced him to 64 months in prison. From that point onward, the developer remained incarcerated. In July, he was denied bail pending an appeal.

In February 2025, his detention was suspended under the condition of electronic monitoring.

On August 23, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two co-founders of Tornado Cash, Roman Semenov and Roman Storm, with money laundering and sanctions violations. The latter was taken into custody.

In August 2025, a jury found Storm partially guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transfer business. After the verdict, the Justice Department announced the cessation of prosecutions against DeFi application developers concerning this charge.

It is worth noting that since December 2024, Hart has been subject to an Interpol «red notice» at the request of Finnish authorities, who are seeking him for intentional tax evasion and assault.