The addition of the Tornado Cash mixer to the sanctions list may violate the US Constitution and is more of a mechanical reaction to the Terra collapse. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kraken CEO Jess Powell said.
Removing the project’s code from GitHub, he called it optional.
“Citizens have the right to financial privacy. We’ll see whether this stands up in court. […] The authorities want to control the availability of digital currency through actions that may be unconstitutional. That scares me a little,” he said.
On August 8, OFAC added to the sanctions list the Tornado Cash mixer site, along with 39 Ethereum addresses and 6 USDC addresses.
According to the agency, since Tornado Cash’s creation in 2019, criminals have laundered cryptocurrency using it to more than $7 billion. According to Elliptic, it is appropriate to speak of about $1.54 billion.
Earlier, members of the decentralized autonomous organization Tornado DAO urged the community to hire a team of lawyers to challenge the service’s blocking.
Later, the crypto-industry–focused advocacy group Coin Center said it intended to challenge the US restrictions.
On August 20 in Amsterdam, a rally will be held in support of the Tornado Cash mixer developer Alexey Pertsev, who was arrested in the Netherlands.
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