Tornado Cash blocks OFAC-sanctioned addresses at frontend level.

Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash has announced the blocking of cryptocurrency addresses sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Tornado Cash uses @chainalysis oracle contract to block OFAC sanctioned addresses from accessing the dapp.
Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance.https://t.co/tzZe7bVjZt

— 🌪️ Tornado.cash 🌪️ (@TornadoCash) April 15, 2022

“Tornado Cash uses the Chainalysis oracle to block access of addresses from the OFAC sanctions list to the dapp. Financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, but it should not be achieved at the cost of breaking the law,” the statement said.

The Chainalysis oracle is a smart contract that verifies whether a cryptocurrency wallet address is on the OFAC sanctions list.

Co-founder Roman Semenov noted that the blocking of addresses is implemented at the frontend level of the application. He said that the service’s smart contracts are “immutable”.

The smart contracts are immutable

— Roman Semenov in Dubai🌪️ 🇺🇦 (@semenov_roman_) April 15, 2022

Some members of the community were skeptical of the service’s statement. They noted that the restriction could be bypassed by using the smart contracts directly.

don’t worry guys, your favorite hackers will still be able to wash the money they have stolen from you using the smartcontract directly. This just affects the website frontend, contract is permisionless

— anowboat (@anowboat) April 15, 2022

“Don’t worry, folks — your favourite hackers will still be able to launder the money they have stolen from you by using the smart contracts directly. This only affects the frontend of the site; the contract is untouched,” a user named anowboat wrote.

Blockchain-consensus researcher Andrey Sobolev, in a ForkLog comment, confirmed that these are changes at the interface level and do not affect smart contracts on the blockchain. The expert noted that bypassing such restrictions is “elementary”.

Earlier in March, Semenov said that Tornado Cash cannot ensure sanctions compliance. He stressed that developers have no more access to the smart contracts than other users.

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