According to the non-profit advocacy group, the ban could be unconstitutional.
Coin Center, a non-profit organization that promotes crypto policy, today announced that it will challenge the Tornado Cash ban by the U.S government in court.
A Washington-based advocacy group, stated Monday that the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control overstepped its boundaries when it blacklisted Tornado Cash last Wednesday, potentially violating constitutional right.
On August 8, the OFAC sanctioned Ethereum Mixing App Tornado Cash by adding it on its Specially Designated Nationals List. It claimed that criminal groups had used Tornado Cash to “launder more than $7B worth of virtual currency since its inception in 2019.” (According blockchain sleuthing company Elliptic however, only $1.5Billion of illicit funds had been transferred through Tornado Cash, while the rest was legitimate use of the service.
“As we suspected,” Coin Center’s executive director Jerry Brito, and research director Peter Van Valkenburgh stated in a blog post.
“We will work with other digital rights advocates in order to seek administrative relief. Brito and Valkenburgh also wrote that they are now looking into challenging the action in court.
Tornado Cash works to hide Ethereum transactions, making it an ideal tool for both Ethereum traders and users who are concerned about privacy.
The U.S. government stated that the app’s developers had “repeatedly failed” to implement effective controls to prevent it from laundering funds for malicious hackers on a regular and basic basis.
Now, anyone who uses the app to receive money from an address that used it will be potentially breaking the law.
Coin Center has argued that the ban is unjust and its implications are not just. Today, it clarified its position by contrasting the Blender.io ban with the blacklisting Tornado Cash. Blender.io, another coin-mixing app, was approved in May by the feds. Coin Center stated that Blender.io was a company or a similar entity and therefore this ban makes sense.
However, Tornado Cash is an open-source, decentralized app that anyone can contribute. It is not controlled by one person, like Blender.io. The blog post stated that the Tornado Cash Entity (which presumably deployed the Tornado Cash Application) has no control over the Application.
“Unlike Blender the Tornado Cash Entity cannot choose whether the Tornado Cash Application mixes or not and it can’t decide which ‘customers to accept’ and which to reject.”
