The native token of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash (TORN) fell 53% — from $3.93 to $1.83 — after Binance announced its delisting.
The trading platform will remove TORN from the list of available assets on December 7. In addition, the exchange will cease support for BitShares (PTS), PERL.eco (PERL) and Waltonchain (WTC).
All of the coins mentioned above also fell in price by roughly 50%.
When a token no longer meets [our] standards or the sector evolves, we conduct a deeper review and may delist the asset. We believe this best protects all our users, according to a Binance statement.
In August 2022, OFAC put Tornado Cash on the sanctions list, a site through which, according to the agency, criminals laundered more than $7 billion in cryptocurrency. More than $455 million of that is linked to the activities of the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.
On August 12, Dutch authorities arrested developer Alexey Pertsev on suspicion of involvement in laundering funds and concealing criminal financial flows. He denied all charges. In April 2023, the court changed his remand to house arrest.
On August 23, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two co-founders of the crypto mixer — Roman Semenov and Roman Storm. The latter refused to plead guilty.
In November, the California-based Bitcoin platform Swan Bitcoin warned users of permanent blocking for direct use of crypto mixers. The company blamed U.S. regulators for a stringent policy.