The project’s website, tornado.cash, has also been sanctioned.
The Github account of Tornado creators has been terminated.
Tornado Cash-related activity is being blocked by businesses. Tornado Cash-related cryptocurrency addresses were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department earlier today, including 38 Ethereum accounts and six USDC addresses. The project’s website, tornado.cash, has also been sanctioned.
In return for a fee, clients may hide the source of their crypto assets using Tornado Cash and other mixers like AlphaBay. To hide the origin and destination of crypto assets, it combines funds that may be recognizable or contaminated with those that are not.
Two more firms have agreed to the terms of the agreement. Those addresses have been banned by Circle, the USDC stablecoin issuer. No official word from USDC, however scraping of USDC’s transactional data reveals that the forbidden addresses have been blocked.
Github Account Suspended
Blacklisting Tornado users may freeze more than $75,000 of their funds, according to one estimate. The Github account of Tornado creators Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev has been terminated in accordance with the sanctions. “My GitHub, account was just suspended,” Semenov posted on Twitter. “Is writing an open source code illegal now?”
A number of Tornado Cash-related GitHub pages have also been removed, however, it is unclear whether these accounts were removed willingly or by GitHub itself. Two blockchain advocacy groups, on the other hand, have spoken out against the sanctions despite their best attempts to comply.
The Treasury Department’s approach, according to Coin Center’s Jerry Brito, has been questioned since it sanctions a tool rather than a single individual accused of wrongdoing. The restriction “crosses a line that the US government has always respected,” Jake Chervinsky, CEO of the Blockchain Association, said in support of Coin Center’s claim.