The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has modified its sanctions against crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
In a Nov. 8 notice, the OFAC said it had amended the existing sanctions against Tornado Cash, rendering sanctions issued in August ineffective.
The new sanctions update the definition of the individuals and entities that make up Tornado Cash. Included in the new list are the protocol’s founders and associated developers, and the Tornado Cash decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, sees these new definitions as a “tacit surrender” to the lawsuit filed by crypto lobbyist Coin Center last month. Coin Center is suing OFAC for the sanctions against Tornado Cash, alleging that it hurts those who seek to transact privately on the blockchain without criminal intentions.
However, Shapiro said that the move could also represent the department’s pivot to a more legally credible argument – an opinion shared by several crypto lawyers.
“Standard govt reaction to plausible lawsuits about their statutory authority to do stuff. Literally same playbook used by Trump admin for their [executive orders] implementing three or four iterations of the ‘travel ban’,” commented Matt McGuire, general counsel at Violet Protocol.
Miller Whitehouse-Levine, the policy director of the DeFi Education fund, highlighted additional smart contractsOFAC added to its sanction list on Tuesday. The updated list includes Tornado Cash’s governance token contract.
