beincrypto.com
There are several prominent token unlocks scheduled for February, including Tornado Cash. But were there any impacts on TORN prices?
This week Tornado Cash unlocked 175,000 tokens as part of its vesting and unlock schedule. Furthermore, TORN prices have reacted strongly over the past week in anticipation of the event. The unlock was worth approximately $1.12 million at prices taken on Feb. 6.
According to the Token Unlocks tracker, the next unlock event for Tornado Cash is in 28 days, on or around March 8.
The Ethereum privacy protocol has been unlocking 1.75% of its total supply every month.
Token Unlocks reported that there was around $48 million worth of unlocks over the past week:
Tornado Cash Supply at 60%
Tornado Cash currently has 60.5% of its supply (around 40 million tokens) unlocked. This gives it a market capitalization of around $10 million.
According to the Unlocks app, projects often carry out token unlocks in order to “release locked shares into the crypto market over a set period of time.” This process aims to align incentives for all stakeholders.
Tornado Cash’s current distribution includes 55% for governance tokens and 30% for the team and investors. Furthermore, 10% goes towards anonymity mining and 5% to the airdrop.
Additionally, token allocations vary greatly among projects. Some have no venture capital, investor, or treasury allocation; others allocate the majority to the core team and early investors.
Heavy VC-influenced tokenomics can have a negative impact on decentralization. Notable projects with a lot of VC influence include Aptos and Uniswap. The latter has just had one investor (a16z) use its mammoth voting power to downvote a governance proposal in favor of another of its favored investments.
Price Update
The privacy protocol’s native token has had a solid week with 15.5% gains over the past seven days. Furthermore, TORN is up 5.2% on the day to trade at $6.64 at the time of press.
TORN has made an impressive 67% over the past month, outpacing most of its crypto brethren. However, the token remains a painful 98.5% loss from its February 2021 all-time high of $436.
Global regulators have been targeting Tornado Cash for its involvement in alleged money laundering and criminal activities.
In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash, accusing it of laundering billions of dollars.