On August 8, the ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash, and all the crypto addresses associated with the platform, were officially banned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC). Following the ban, the internet hosting service for software and open source code development, Github, erased some of the Tornado Cash commits and suspended some of the project’s contributors.
Tornado Cash Github Contributors Suspended from Github, Blacklisted ERC20s Left to Liquidity Providers
Tornado Cash has become a topical conversation in the world of cryptocurrencies as the U.S. government decided to ban the privacy-enhancing ethereum mixing service on Monday. The U.S. Treasury Department’s watchdog OFAC did not disclose exactly why Tornado Cash was sanctioned but it is suspected that it was due to the North Korean hacking syndicate known as Lazarus Group.
My @GitHub account was just suspended 🤷
Is writing an open source code illegal now?
— Roman Semenov 🌪️ 🇺🇦 (@semenov_roman_) August 8, 2022
Lazarus Group associates allegedly used Tornado Cash to mix funds. On April 15, 2022, the official Tornado Cash Twitter account explained that it had blocked flagged ethereum addresses listed on the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons list (SDN). “Tornado Cash uses [a] Chainalysis oracle contract to block OFAC sanctioned addresses from accessing the dapp,” the project’s social media account said at the time. The Tornado Cash Twitter account added:
Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance.
Now reports detail that developers that have contributed to the Tornado Cash codebase on Github have been suspended and a few commits have been deleted. Tornado Cash’s founder, Roman Semenov, explained that his Github account was suspended. “My
