The sanction of cryptocurrency mixer, Tornado Cash by the United States Treasury Department on August 8 has made the CEO of Kraken, Josse Powell to question the constitutionality of the decision. He argued that banning an open source code whose primary aim is to protect privacy is like banning emails just because criminals can use them.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, Powell said he doubted if the Treasury’s decision can withstand judicial examination. Tornado Cash allows users to conceal the sources and destinations of their assets by mixing several users’ coins before sending them to their destination wallet addresses.
Tornado Cash had been on the radar of the U.S. authorities since the Ronin Bridge hack in March, in which the hackers stole over $625 million. There were other high-profile attacks since the beginning of the year, amounting to $1.4 Billion. Many times, the attackers managed to remain traceless by diverting the funds through Tornado Cash. The U.S. Treasury argued that some of the victims are U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Kraken has blocked all accounts linked to Tornado Cash following the sanctions by the U. S. Treasury Department against the cryptocurrency mixer. Earlier, USDC which is a consortium of Circle and Coinbase had also blocked any addresses linked to the mixer.
CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire said Circle and Coinbase had to follow the Treasury’s sanctions against Tornado Cash because it is in line with the Bank Secrecy Act. Powell however referred to Circle’s move to block Tornado addresses because of the U.S. Treasury sanctions as a move to control decentralized networks.
Powell argued that there are law-abiding, privacy seeking customers among Tornado Cash users whose interests should not have been jeopardized. Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin also came out in defense of the privacy features of Tornado Cash to say that he used the crypto mixer to send his donation to Ukraine, not to protect his identity but to protect that of the recipient. Non-profit crypto policy think tank Coin Centre released a legal analysis of OFAC’s shutdown order on 15th August, arguing that sanctioning the entire platform is unjustified.
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