- The US Treasury has taken Tornado Cash addresses off its OFAC sanctions list as of Friday.
- This move may assist the founders of Tornado Cash in their ongoing legal issues with the DOJ.
- Following the announcement, TORN saw a remarkable increase of 73%.
On Friday, TORN surged past 70% after the news that the United States Treasury had removed the crypto mixer Tornado Cash from its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list.
Tornado Cash addresses eliminated from US sanctions roster
The OFAC, part of the US Treasury Department, has lifted Tornado Cash from its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) roster.
As revealed in an update on the OFAC’s official platform, the addresses associated with Tornado Cash have been removed from the SDN list, effectively lifting any prohibitions against the protocol within the United States.
“We have chose to exercise our discretion in lifting the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash, as documented in Treasury’s filing in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury,” stated the US Treasury in a press release on Friday.
Nonetheless, the Treasury continues to express concerns regarding money laundering operations linked to North Korean hackers, specifically the Lazarus Group.
Tornado Cash was initially sanctioned by OFAC in 2022, prohibiting US citizens from using the services offered by the platform. The US Treasury accused Tornado Cash of enabling hackers to launder more than $7 billion in digital assets since its launch in 2019, encompassing stolen funds from North Korea’s Lazarus Group among others.
In 2023, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Tornado Cash co-founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov for facilitating over $1 billion in cryptocurrency transactions linked to the Lazarus Group.
A Dutch court found another co-founder, Alexey Pertsev, guilty in May 2024 of laundering around $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency, resulting in a sentence of sixty-four months in prison.
The Treasury’s decision to remove Tornado Cash from its blacklist could have significant implications for the legal proceedings involving the platform’s founders against the DOJ.
This action is also viewed as a substantial victory for privacy tokens and the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, signaling a more favorable landscape for crypto privacy in the US.
Following the announcement, TORN experienced a swift increase, jumping over 70% to reach the $15 mark, and extending its weekly gains to more than 100%, positioning itself as a leader in the privacy token sphere.
It is worth mentioning that the rise in TORN’s price can be attributed in part to its modest market capitalization of $57 million, meaning that relatively small buy orders can quickly influence its price.
In addition, Tornado Cash’s removal from the OFAC sanctions list may initiate a rally in the privacy tokens market in the days ahead.