The popular Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash began checking addresses for their presence on the US sanctions list.
Representatives of Tornado Cash, a project for mixing crypto transfers, announced on Twitter about starting cooperation with analytics company Chainalysis to check users’ addresses for their presence on the US government sanctions lists.
The developers claim that “preserving freedom through financial privacy” is still the project’s priority, but “it should not come at the cost of non-compliance” with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
The project team didn’t disclose the reason behind the decision. However, the community is confident that the primary cause is the recent attack on the Ronin sidechain, the largest hack in the history of the DeFi segment. In particular, the reason was that the attackers managed to withdraw most of the stolen coins through Tornado Cash.
However, the crypto mixer follows the requirements of the US government only nominally, as users pointed out. This is reflected in restricting sanctioned addresses’ access to the service exclusively through the project’s website. There is still no global verification of interaction with the Tornado Cash smart contract, so hackers will be able to use it directly.
Using Ethereum mixers is the most popular way to hide traces of a digital asset crime. For example, Tornado Cash’s anonymous transactions helped pull out $200 million in assets in the BitMart cryptocurrency exchange hack.
