Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency “mixer” designed to make it more difficult to track cryptocurrency transactions, was sanctioned by the Biden administration and made illegal due to its usage in facilitating some significant laundering schemes. But Donald Trump, the crypto president, has brought it back. The United States Treasury Department announced Friday that it will lift sanctions against Tornado Cash, allowing it to be used again to anonymize cryptocurrency transactions.
Here’s the quick and dirty back story on Tornado Cash: The protocol was launched in 2019 as a way for cryptocurrency users to obscure ownership over currency. You take “tainted” money (i.e., coins that have been identified and associated with a person), run it through Tornado Cash where it gets split up, mixed into a larger pool, and moved around until it is effectively “clean” and unidentifiable. By 2022, it was taking heat from the Department of the Treasury because it was allegedly used by malicious actors to launder cryptocurrency stolen as part of a hack.
Once Biden’s Treasury Department got around to issuing its sanctions in August 2022, it accused Tornado Cash of laundering more than $7 billion, including nearly $500 million that the agency claimed had been stolen by the North Korean-sponsored hacking collective the Lazarus Group. By sanctioning the protocol and its founder, the Biden administration basically made it illegal to use Tornado Cash in the United States.
It seems, though, that the sanctions may not have been all that effective (and, according to a federal court, not all that legal). A study found that usage of Tornado Cash continued to climb despite its placement on the blacklist. And last year, a federal appeals court ruled that the Treasury overstepped its legal authority by sanctioning the protocol—an outcome that was arrived at because the blacklist is designed to punish foreign entities, and Tornado Cash, which runs autonomously via self-executing smart contracts, is not owned or operated by a foreign national.
This brings us to today, when the Trump administration is officially lifting the restrictions on Tornado Cash, allowing it to once again function in the United States. Crypto people are certainly celebrating the move, calling it a win for “privacy.” Others, like Democratic Congressman Sean Casten, called it “one of the most dangerous and irresponsible things coming out of the Trump White House.”
Casten might be going a little hard there; typically, additional privacy is a good thing even if it means that some people might use it maliciously, like encrypted messaging. Of course, there’s an argument that the average person has use for encrypted messaging and a crypto tumbler is basically only useful for criminal activity. But there’s a world in which it doesn’t really matter either way—tools for tracing on-chain activity, even those that go through efforts to hide the details, are becoming more sophisticated and some experts believe transactions on Tornado Cash are already traceable with enough effort.
