The US-banned Ethereum (ETH) Mixer Tornado Cash is back on GitHub. Last month, the protocol was blacklisted by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), because Tornado Cash makes it possible to anonymize ethereum transactions.
Tornado Cash is back
Hours after OFAC issued the ban on Tornado Cash, the code disappeared from GitHub. The coding platform has received a lot of criticism from the cryptocurrency community for this. Partly because the OFAC has made clear in a statement that Americans are not prohibited from publishing the open-source code of Tornado Cash.
On Thursday, September 22, a happy Preston van Loon, a major developer for Ethereum, announced that Tornado Cash’s code is back online on GitHub. Van Loon is one of the members of the Ethereum community who has spoken out during the protocol issues.
“Computer code is an expression and freedom of expression is a constitutional right worth protecting,” Van Loon wrote at the time. GitHub itself indicates welcome the recent clarification from the OFAC regarding open-source code, which will allow certain parts of the website to go back online.
North Korean Hackers
Last month, the OFAC put forward North Korean hackers as the reason for the Tornado Cash ban. According to the OFAC, the infamous Lazarus Group used the software to mask stolen assets on the Ethereum blockchain.
According to authorities, $7 billion in capital has flowed through the application since its publication in 2019. Not everyone agrees with that number, though, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic say that it concerns 7.6 billion dollars, of which ‘only’ $1.5 billion is criminal. Multiple politicians criticized the ban, and a professor from John Hopkins University even published an “archive fork” of the Tornado Cash source code on GitHub for research purposes.
If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, I wrote a short FAQ on the main page below. I also give links to some other clones and forks. https://t.co/D1ba52JfPB
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) August 22, 2022
