OFAC Just Got Tornado’d: Court Says “Nyet” to Treasury’s Sanctions Dance!

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  • Ah, the mighty Tornado Cash has spun a whirlwind right through OFAC’s carefully crafted sandbox—a triumph that might just send shivers down the spines of web3 wizards and DeFi dreamers alike, both here and in the farthest reaches of the blockchain cosmos.
  • Yet, lest we pop the champagne too soon, remember: the crypto mixers remain the playgrounds of the ne’er-do-wells, a lingering specter haunting the fragile utopia of the crypto realm.

In the land of cowboys and BBQ, United States District Judge Robert Pitman (perhaps channeling a touch of Woland’s decree) decreed on April 28 that the Office of Foreign Assets Control may no longer fiddle with the original sanctions against the infamous Tornado Cash. Imagine Treasury agents clutching their paperwork, aghast as their magic wand fizzled mid-spell. 🎩🐇

Flashback to August 2022: OFAC, with the flair of a meddlesome bureaucrat, slapped Tornado Cash onto the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list, blaming it for laundering a staggering $7 billion in crypto, courtesy of the North Korea-backed Lazarus crew—villains straight out of a dystopian novel, if ever there were.

But enter the brave advocates led by Joseph Van Loon, who argued that a string of zeros and ones—the immutable smart contracts—are no more “persons” or “property” than a ghost in the machine. In a courtroom drama fit for Pilate’s judgement seat, they challenged Treasury’s reach and dared to invoke the sacred rights of free speech and financial privacy. Tornado Cash, it seems, has the resilience of a literary antihero, living on in America’s regulatory shadows.

The Grand Finale: Treasury Gets a Literary Smackdown 

This judicial slap to the Treasury’s pomp augurs well for web3 devs, from Silicon Valley’s coffee shops to the deepest cryptographic dungeons worldwide. Legal luminary Paul Grewal of Coinbase and his merry band of web3 sages celebrated the ruling with what one assumes was an excess of digital confetti and blockchain memes.

Interestingly, this opens a curious kaleidoscope: open-source development of web3 protocols might just thrive under the peculiar auspices of the (still) Trump era, all while the crypto law fog begins to somewhat clear—like a Moscow fog reluctantly yielding to dawn. 🌫️➡️☀️

Meanwhile, the price of TORN fluttered upward by a modest 1%, dancing around $7.38—hardly a tempest, but an encouraging breeze for a small-cap altcoin with a market cap of $74 million and $2.6 million exchanged in just 24 hours. Its rally over 160% in the past year would make even the most stoic bear market blush. 📈🐻

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2025-04-29 02:22