Tornado Cash Has Been Blocking Access Of OFAC Sanctioned Addresses

tornado cash
tornado cash

Last Friday saw Tornado Cash announce that it had been utilizing oracle contracts to block several wallet addresses that had been sanctioned by the OFAC. The move does come immediately after the Department of Treasury went on to link Lazarus Group, one of the foremost cybercriminal groups from North Korea, as a major perpetrator of the recent exploit of the Ronin Bridge. As informed by Elliptic, the hackers went on to send around $80.3 million worth of Ether through the cryptocurrency. The team also stated that the maintenance of financial privacy was quite essential to the preservation of their freedom.

Tornado Cash Looking To Make A New Mark 

For the uninformed, Tornado Cash is quite a popular cryptocurrency mixture that is generally used to obfuscate transaction trails in order to maintain privacy. The Chainanalysis Sanctions Oracle is one tool that has the power to validate if a cryptocurrency wallet address seems to be included in a sanctions designation from the USA, EU, or the UN. But Roman Semenov, the co-founder of this cryptocurrency, later stated that the instrument simply blocks access to the DApp, and nothing else. 

Interestingly, Tornado Cash has been found in traces in several controversial decentralized finance activities. In February, the Wormhole exploit of $375 million saw hackers experimenting with Tornado which they did through the stolen funds. The same month also saw the team from LooksRare using this cryptocurrency to form out $30 million in crypto. 

Currently, it does appear that the co-founder of Tornado seems to have had enough of the protocol’s association with the illicit activities- and is looking toward cleaning the slate. Only time will tell if Tornado Cash can do something about its dubious image and clean up the recent allegations.