At the beginning of this week, the United States blacklisted the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. It is now illegal for US residents to use the service, and yesterday even one of the co-founders was arrested in Amsterdam. Now the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has also been disbanded.
Tornado Cash mixer no longer exists
This seems to have officially ended the well-known mixer. Yesterday there was quite a stir when it turned out that one of the founders and also programmers had been arrested. In principle, he would not have done anything illegal directly. Tornado Cash’s DAO was responsible for the mixer’s policies, but now it’s all of a sudden taken offline.
The official Twitter channel reports that the sanctions not only restricted the service itself, but also the GitHub page, personal GitHub accounts of Tornado Cash developers, the Tornado Cash domain on Ethereum, and all USDC contracts on Tornado Cash. There would have been more than USD 75,000 on the mixer’s addresses.
The Infura and Alchemy plug-ins, which do not come directly from Tornado Cash itself, are also subject to the sanctions. Members of the corresponding Discord channel explain on Twitter that this chat group has also been closed.
Here’s the list of Tornado Cash resources that were banned
– Tornado Cash @GitHub organization
– personal @GitHub accounts or TC contributors
– all $USDC on Tornado Cash contracts @circlepay
– @infura_io RPC
– @AlchemyPlatform RPC
– https://t.co/SHvgEjTOMV domain @eth_limo— 🌪️ Tornado.cash 🌪️ (@TornadoCash) August 9, 2022
Uncertainty about DAO taken offline
Why the DAO was also taken offline is not officially clear, although it is obvious that it is because of the sanctions. Shortly before the site went offline, according to users still voted about adding a multi-sig function for the greenhouse. This would contain about 21.6 million dollars in three different wallets. The vote is said to have been approved by 100% of the participants, although only twelve participants added 51,000 Tron (TRX).
Meanwhile, the publisher of the DAI stablecoin, MakerDAO, is seriously considering abandoning DAI’s peg (peg) with the dollar because Circle no longer recognizes the USDC on Tornado Cash. More on this later on Crypto Insiders.