Tag Archives: Tornado Cash

America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is supporting a legal challenge against the U.S. Treasury Department following its sanctions against the privacy protocol Tornado Cash. The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include 6 individuals who have personally used the mixer, some of which include Coinbase employees. Defending Tornado’s Use Cases As reported by CNBC, Coinbase’s senior security risk analyst said he used Tornado Cash to anonymize his cryptocurrency donations to Ukraine, for...

North Korea and the United States are once again going at each other’s throats in the name of cryptocurrency activity. This time, it looks like the U.S. has put sanctions in place against North Korea-based crypto mixer Tornado Cash, which at the time of writing, is alleged to have laundered more than $7 billion in digital funds. North Korea Has Been Using Tornado for the Wrong Reasons North Korea has long been the subject of crypto speculation amongst North American...

Tornado Cash was added to the US sanctions list by the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) on August 8. Two days later, Alexey Pertsev, a coder tied to the crypto mixing service, was arrested by Dutch authorities. The blacklisting and the subsequent events sparked an outcry from privacy proponents, with many protesting and engaging in acts of civil disobedience. But according to intelligence firm, Kharon, Pertsev was formerly employed by a company linked to Russia’s...

Tether – the issuer of USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin – is yet to freeze addresses associated with the privacy protocol Tornado Cash. That means USDT holders can still technically use the smart contract to obfuscate their funds.  However, it remains unclear whether Tether’s permissiveness amounts to a violation of U.S. sanctions. Tether and Tornado According to a statement from Tether on Wednesday, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has established no...

The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)’s placement of popular crypto tumbler Tornado Cash as an entity on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanction list has raised many eyebrows. The subsequent removal of its source code from the Microsoft-owned GitHub, which also shut down the user accounts of three individuals who contributed code to the project, prompted an outcry from privacy and free speech advocates. While forks of the open source software have remained...