As reported by Cryptory.net, the US Treasury Department on Monday blacklisted the virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash and its associated wallet addresses, saying this platform “has been used to launder more than $7 bilion worth of cryptocurrencies since its creation in 2019”. This means that all US organizations and citizens will be prohibited to use and interact with Tornado Cash as well as related wallets. Anyone who breaks the rule can face up to 30 years in prison.
Tornado Cash’s open source code disappeared from GitHub just after the Treasury announcement. Circle, the issuer of USDC stablecoin, froze more than 75,000 USDC linked to unsuspecting Tornado Cash users in response to a request from law enforcement. Many RPC providers like Infura and Alchemy have also started blocking Tornado Cash since August 9.
Then on Tuesday, some Twitter users found it strange that someone sent a slew of Tornado Cash transactions with 0.1 ETH to the Ethereum address of many celebs in the crypto space.
It appears to be a prank to challenge the novel Tornado Cash sanctions. However, it also points to the absurdity of the ban because with the decentralized nature of Tornado and Ethereum, users can still connect an ETH wallet to this mixer platform, and then send ETH to any address; the recipient also cannot refuse to accept. However, under the new law, US citizens and organizations in the aforementioned group must block receiving money from Tornado Cash, freeze the transaction and the amount received.
Since the US banned Tornado Cash, many people have joked about sending ETH from Tornado to scammers or someone you hate because any address that holds ETH sent from Tornado will be blacklisted. It is not clear how the US government will deal with these celebrity addresses that received ETH from Tornado on August 9.
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