Tornado Cash DAO goes down without explanation following vote on treasury funds

The Tornado Cash DAO has been taken offline after many social media users reported that the community was discussing ways to challenge sanctions recently imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

When issued, Tornado Cash DAO was Community members reportedly voted unanimously to add that governance layer to the Treasury’s multisig wallet as a signatory. report $21.6 million. It’s unclear what caused the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to take a turn for the worse, but it follows a series of actions taken by various authorities and private groups following the US sanctions announced Monday against the controversial Mixer. I’m here.

In the past four days, Circle has frozen more than 75,000 USD Coin (USDC) worth of funds at addresses listed by Treasury officials, and dYdX has blocked some users’ accounts with funds linked to Tornado Cash. and blocked Alchemy and Infura.io remotely. A procedure call request to the crypto mixer. On Friday, the Dutch financial crime crackdown also announced the arrest of a developer allegedly involved in money laundering via Tornado Cash.

Actions by centralized firms have gone beyond trading with crypto mixers to reach telecom platforms. On Monday, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov reported that developer platform GitHub has suspended his account and Discord user. said mixer channel Friday was also dark. At the time this article was published, Tornado Cash’s Telegram group was still active.

Here is the list of prohibited tornado cache resources:

– Tornado cache @GitHub organization
– Personal @GitHub top-level user account
– all $USDC About Tornado Cash contract @circle pay
– @infura_io RPCs
– @alchemy platform RPCs
– https://t.co/SHvgEjTOMV domain @eth_limo

Tornado.cash (@TornadoCash) August 9, 2022

It’s unclear why seemingly neutral channels, including Discord, were removed following US sanctions. However, according to a joint statement by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the prohibited transactions based on Tornado Cash’s inclusion on the list of Specially Designated Countries will be interpreted as follows: There is a possibility. include “You are downloading software patches from an authorized entity.” Penalties for failing to comply with sanctions can include large fines and imprisonment.

Related: Open source UI code for controversial mixer Tornado Cash

For the first time in history, the U.S. government has criminalized any interaction with software, Omid Malekhan, an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School who also teaches cryptocurrencies and blockchain, said in a statement to Cointelegraph. Stated. This is a major departure from their traditional mandate to sanction people, companies and governments. There is evidence that the project in question was indeed used by criminals/hackers to obfuscate funds. But it also has many legitimate uses.

Before the sanctions were imposed, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used Tornado Cash to donate funds to Ukraine, targeting recipients’ financial privacy in the middle of the war-torn country. On Tuesday, an anonymous individual used a crypto mixer to send Ether (ETH) to a number of celebrities in an attempt to challenge the severity of the sanctions.