Complying With Tornado Cash Sanctions: GitHub and Circle

U.S. Treasury regulations are being enforced by at least two companies.

Abstract:

• Sanctions against Tornado Cash have been implemented by the US Treasury and are being enforced by Circle and GitHub.
• Certain developers’ accounts on GitHub and Circle have been suspended due to blacklisting.
• Two blockchain advocacy groups have spoken out against the Treasury’s sweeping sanctions in other places.

Tornado Sanctions are Enforced by Companies

Tornado Cash-related activities are being blocked by businesses.

38 Ethereum addresses and 6 USDC addresses linked to Tornado Cash were sanctioned by the US Treasury earlier today. The website tornado.cash was also given the go-ahead.

Two businesses have now agreed to the terms. The USDC stablecoin’s issuer, Circle, provides a list of blocked addresses.

USDC’s blacklisting mechanism has been scraped by a bot, and the scraped transactions show that the blacklisted addresses have been blocked.

More than 75,000 USDC ($75,000) in Tornado customers’ accounts are expected to be frozen as a result of this blacklisting action.

Several Tornado developers, notably Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, have had their accounts on Github terminated in order to comply with the restrictions. Semenov said today on Twitter that his GitHub account had been suspended. Does it seem as though creating open-source software is suddenly against the law?

A number of Tornado Cash-related GitHub sites have also been removed, however it is unclear if these accounts were removed willingly or by GitHub itself.

Two blockchain advocacy groups, meanwhile, have come out against the punishments in contradiction to their own compliance efforts.

Treasury’s stance was slammed by Jerry Brito of Coin Center since it sanctioned “neutral” tools rather than individuals guilty of wrongdoing.

According to Jake Chervinsky, CEO of the Blockchain Association, the prohibition “crosses a line that has traditionally been recognized by the United States Government.”