Tornado Cash sanctions are still being fought against by cryptocurrency activists

By Clark

The advocacy group for the cryptocurrency sector has backed Coin Centre in its legal action against the US Treasury for its Tornado Cash penalties.

The Blockchain Association and the DeFi Education Fund have joined the list of business groups that have backed Coin Center’s action against the US Treasury for its “illegal” sanctions against Tornado Cash. They are the newest group of business groups to do so.

The two organisations that assist the cryptocurrency sector submitted a joint amicus brief in favour of Coin Centre on June 2 and demanded that the United States lift its sanctions against the crypto mixer.

“Both unprecedented and unlawful,” they continued, referring to the penalties imposed by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Sanctions imposed by OFAC are illegal. Despite the fact that OFAC lacks the legal power to impose penalties on programmes like Tornado Cash, their judgement is devoid of any factual support.

The organisations countered that while OFAC is legally able to impose sanctions on individuals or entities, it cannot do so on a decentralised protocol because Tornado Cash is software.

They asserted, “The core Tornado Cash software is not and cannot be owned by anyone,” and that OFAC “conjured” a “person” to give it justification for sanctioning the cryptocurrency mixer.

The brief acknowledged that the protocol has been used maliciously for money laundering, primarily by North Korean-affiliated hackers, but it also highlighted several less sinister applications, such as enhancing privacy on the publicly accessible Ethereum blockchain.

The organizations contended that the sanctions ought to be deemed illegal and that the courts need to forbid their use.

The two organizations simultaneously submitted an amicus brief in April in support of a case that was essentially identical to the one that six people had filed against the Treasury Department for its Tornado Cash sanctions.

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which also wants to lift the mixer prohibition, supports the September complaint.

Tornado Cash frequently failed to implement measures to prevent money laundering, according to the Treasury, who argued that such crypto mixers pose a threat to national security.