Cyclone Protocol- Fork of Tornado Cash

[Rikafip]

What happened: Cyclone protocol aims to introduce privacy to Ethereum transactions. Problem here is that the are copying the another older project that is already doing the same, Tornado Cash. As you can see they are using similar name, they have similar looking website and Cyclone Protocol took some content content from Tornado Cash.

Edit: seems like they mentioned that Cyclone is forked Tornado, so I stand corrected but nevertheless I would still advise everyone to stay away from this as it looks like there is very little effort involved in this.

ANN https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310841.0
Archive https://archive.fo/e3IyS

Website https://cyclone.xyz
Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210120074058/https://cyclone.xyz/

Tornado Cash website https://tornado.cash

Domain Name: CYCLONE.XYZ
Registry Domain ID: D157351201-CNIC
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: https://namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2021-01-08T15:04:25.0Z
Creation Date: 2019-12-30T11:38:16.0Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-12-30T23:59:59.0Z

First let's start with their opening lines in their ANN thread, which they took from Tornado Cash Medium article

By default, your entire blockchain transaction history and balances are public. All transactions can be seen on block explorers like Etherscan, and anyone who knows that you own a particular address can easily view your payments, trace the source of your funds, calculate your holdings, and analyze your on-chain activity.

But what if you did not want your history and balances to be publicly viewed by everyone? What if you wanted anonymity and privacy when it came to your transactions?

By default, your entire Ethereum transaction history and balances are public. All transactions can be seen on block explorers like Etherscan, and anyone who knows that you own a particular address can easily view your payments, trace the source of your funds, calculate your holdings, and analyse your on-chain activity.

But what if you did not want your history and balances to be publicly viewed by everyone? What if you wanted anonymity and privacy, when it came to your transactions?

Cyclone applies zkSNARKs to enable transactional privacy by breaking the on-chain link between depositor and recipient addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts coins/tokens deposits, which can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever an asset is withdrawn from Cyclone, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit for absolute privacy.

Tornado improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between recipient and destination addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts ETH deposits that can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever ETH is withdrawn by the new address, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit, ensuring complete privacy.

Then let's move on the website comparison, Everything is pretty obvious here. Imagine how competent and hard working they are when they can't be bothered to make even these basics by themselves. Instead they opted for ripping of Tornado visual style too,




And this is how it looks when you click on the "App" button. Copy/Paste continues.

[Kittygalore]

They did not even bother to change the name of their project to something that is so much different than the original. A little knowledge about the previous project would be enough to piece the puzzle together with this knock-off project. Good catch @Rikafip, cheers for more years of scam and fake projects busting.

[Christabel247]

I didn't see any update about their team and the name similar too.

[dkbit98]

I think that Tornado Cash is open source so anyone can fork it as they like and rebrand it, and they did that plus they included their CYC token and IOTX instead of Ethereum.
If you check on their github page you will see what exactly they forked:
https://github.com/cycloneprotocol

Cyclone
Cyclone is a non-custodial Coin and ERC20 privacy-preserving protocol based on zkSNARKs, which is based on the implementation and trust-setup of tornado.cash. It improves transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between the recipient and destination addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts Coins deposits that can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever Coins are withdrawn by the new address, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit, ensuring complete privacy.

Tornado works great on Ethereum but

The degree of privacy it provides is proportional to the anonymity set in each of its pools, the size of which are stagnated, unfortunately;
Decentralized governance is missing to evolve this utility to evolve.
Cyclone is built to address these two problems, which aims to provide 100x privacy with self-evolving-ness based on the built-in crypto-economic incentives - which encourages liquidity to be added to the anonymity pool and best ideas get implemented/deployed via decentralized governance.

Cyclone is firstly launched on IoTeX as it is a decentralized, fast, and feature-rich blockchain with a healthy and great community!

https://github.com/cycloneprotocol/cyclone-contracts

Cyclone is a multi-chain, non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocol. Cyclone applies zkSNARKs to enable transactional privacy by breaking the on-chain link between depositor and recipient addresses. It uses a smart contract that accepts coins/tokens deposits, which can be withdrawn by a different address. Whenever an asset is withdrawn from Cyclone, there is no way to link the withdrawal to the deposit for absolute privacy.
Cyclone's zkSNARKs is based on the trusted code and implementation of tornado.cash, which works great on Ethereum...

https://docs.cyclone.xyz/

By default, your entire #blockchain tx history are public; anyone who knows your address can easily view your payments, trace your funds, and analyze your activities!

@TornadoCash
 & us solve the same problem w/ similar tech, what's the difference?

https://twitter.com/cycloneprotocol/status/1349610676063412224

My opinions is that I would not call this a copy/paste scam (yet), but just a fork and they even mention Tornado.cash several times.
Maybe needs more investigation, and I am not sure if this woke up guy who created ANN is related with their team.

[Rikafip]

I think that Tornado Cash is open source so anyone can fork it as they like and rebrand it, and they did that plus they included their CYC token and IOTX instead of Ethereum.
If you check on their github page you will see what exactly they forked:
https://github.com/cycloneprotocol

True, you are right, somehow I completely missed that they mentioned Tornado Cash. Thanks for pointing that out.

My opinions is that I would not call this a copy/paste scam (yet), but just a fork and they even mention Tornado.cash several times.

It is true that they mentioned Tornado, and thanks to that fact it makes them a bit less scammy, but the fact remains that there is very little of their own in here. Even if it's fork, I don't think that is encouraging for anyone that wants to get involve in this to see that they copied their website and visual style, choose very similar but a bit different name and word for word copied parts of Tornado Medium article. It's lazy and reeks of incompetence and I wouldn't touch it with a ten inc pole.

I removed negative tag and instead left neutral for now.