Circle freezes USDC on Tornado Cash addresses amid U.S. sanctions
Circle has blacklisted USDC addresses of the Tornado Cash mixing service following OFAC sanctions.
Circle just frozen 75,000 USDC belonging to unsuspecting Tornado users, as well as 149 USDC donated to the project. pic.twitter.com/GBS41FtZvB
— banteg (@bantg) August 8, 2022
According to Etherscan data, one of the stablecoin’s operators blocked movement of at least 75,000 USDC.
Infura and Alchemy blocked RPC requests to Tornado Cash. The services allow users of dapps to interact with blockchain servers. Some commentators linked the providers’ move to sanctions.
It’s happening.@infura_io and @AlchemyPlatform are now blocking RPC requests to @TornadoCash
Centralized RPC services are one of the cancers that undermine the core benefits of crypto.
As long as they dominate the market, no protocol is truly permissionless. pic.twitter.com/3TI3QmDgmD
— ノーネーム (@0xdev0) August 9, 2022
On August 8, the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC placed Tornado Cash on the sanctions list. According to the agency, since the service’s inception in 2019, criminals laundered more than $7 billion in cryptocurrency with its help. More than $455 million of that is linked to the North Korean Lazarus Group.
“Circle is a regulated company and complies with sanctions compliance requirements. We have taken measures and blocked the Tornado Cash addresses designated by OFAC,” the firm told The Block.
The Tornado Cash site is not loading. However, according to the service’s founder, Roman Semenov, it is a static landing page. He added that URLs that allow access to the app itself are still working.
Interesting that a static landing page url https://t.co/rXJRuyyEw1 was sanctioned but not urls which can be used to access the actual dapp.
— Roman Semenov 🌪️ 🇺🇦 (@semenov_roman_) August 8, 2022
Semenov confirmed that his GitHub page has been blocked.
As a reminder, in May OFAC sanctioned the cryptocurrency mixer Blender.io for money laundering by North Korean hackers.
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