What’s the story around Tornado Cash? The U.S. Department of the Treasury made its case in a press release, but the question still lingers. Because, as many people have pointed out, Tornado Cash is not an institution. It’s a smart contract in the Ethereum blockchain and, according to US law, code is supposed to be speech. Are they challenging that? To make things even more suspicious, the Netherlands arrested an alleged Tornado Cash developer.
What is going on here? Was that man arrested just for writing code? How’s that possible? He didn’t launder that money himself… or did he? According to FIOD, the developer “is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash.”
That could mean a number of things. Is there more to this story? Is the developer guilty of other crimes besides writing code? Or did the world’s authorities start an all-out war on privacy while we weren’t looking? Very few people are able to answer those questions at the moment. What we can do, though, is consult with the Twitterati and see what the general sentiment out there is.
The headline: "Treasury Sanctions Tornado Cash"
Reality: TC is not a person, nor a business entity. It's an open source software tool. It cannot be sanctioned, it does not respond to subpoena or legal request.
***It is privacy-seeking Americans who have been sanctioned.***
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) August 8, 2022
TORN price chart on Uniswap3 | Source: TORN/USDC on TradingView.com
People use crypto privacy techniques in large part to stop exchanges/corporations/others from spying on their subsequent transactions.
They are also used by human rights groups in authoritarian parts of the world.
— Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) August 12, 2022
People have started to make resistance art to protest the arrest of a Tornado Cash developer. This is a copy of the Tornado Cash smart contract, encoded as art. pic.twitter.com/DZMD9bkDrw
— Lucy Harley-McKeown 📖 (@LHM1) August 12, 2022
One of many valid use cases of privacy protocols: donating to a cause that might get you in trouble if done publicly https://t.co/LJM4Gd4dFf
— 🌪️ Tornado.cash 🌪️ (@TornadoCash) August 9, 2022
2 potential possibilities:
1) tornado cash had identifiably material volume for money laundering. idk what the estimate is, but probably 1-2bn? nobody really using coinjoin on such scale.
2) maybe the arrested guy was not just a dev, but actually assisting organised crime.
— Cobie (@cobie) August 12, 2022
Stay tuned to Bitcoinist for new developments in this fascinating new case.
Featured Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay | Charts by TradingView
Tornado Cash’s co-founder, Roman Storm, is challenging accusations made by US authorities, asserting that the service is not intended for facilitating money laundering.
CatherineAn Arbitrum spokesperson confirmed that the proposal to fund the legal defense of Tornado Cash developers was removed at the request of the author.
JinseFinancePertsev, a Russian national living in the Netherlands, has been accused of facilitating money laundering by developing the now sanctioned app
OthersThe plot thickens. Did the supposed Tornado Cash developer arrested in The Netherlands have ties to a Russian security agency? ...
BitcoinistTORN, the token of Tornado Cash, plummeted by nearly a quarter in the last 24 hours after Dutch authorities arrested ...
BitcoinistThe Tornado Cash chronicle unfolds. Authorities in the Netherlands apprehended a man suspected to be a Tornado Cash developer in ...
BitcoinistThe Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service doesn't rule out multiple arrests in its ongoing criminal investigation against the crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
CointelegraphRoman Semenov, co-founder of TornadoCash, tweeted that his GitHub account had been suspended after the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement, and the Tornado Cash repository has also been deleted from GitHub.
链向资讯The exploiter seems to have rejected the Harmony team’s bounty offer of $1 million to return the $100 million stolen from the Horizon Bridge token bridge.
CointelegraphOnce fully deployed, users will be able to conduct private transactions through the popular Tornado Cash mixer on Arbitrum's second layer network.
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