turned cash

Tornado Cash: The noose is ever tightening in the world of cryptocurrencies

15th May 2024

The Tornado Cash court ruling shook the cryptocurrency space, raising fundamental questions about the limits of financial privacy and state surveillance in a decentralized ecosystem. Indeed, this announcement follows the recent arrest of the founders of Samourai Wallet for similar reasons.

While the American authorities have taken unprecedented measures by sanctioning this cryptocurrency mixing service, the crypto community is wondering and outraged about the long-term implications of this decision for the future of confidentiality and innovation in the digital space.

The Emergence of Tornado Cash: A Controversial Privacy Tool

Tornado Cash began life in 2019 as a crypto transaction mixing service, designed to provide users with a way to conceal the origin and destination of their digital funds. Co-founded by Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm, this decentralized protocol, based on the Ethereum blockchain, has quickly gained popularity thanks to its advanced privacy features.

How Tornado Cash Works

The heart of Tornado Cash lies in its “mixing pools,” which use zero-knowledge proofs to obfuscate the links between deposits and withdrawals. Users can deposit tokens into a pool, which are then mixed with other funds, before users can withdraw them under a new address. This process breaks transaction traceability, providing an additional layer of privacy. After using tornado cash, it is almost impossible to trace the origin of the addresses.

The Lure of Financial Privacy and Malicious Use

Tornado Cash quickly attracted the attention of a variety of users, ranging from human rights activists to wealthy investors to cyber criminals. It is this last category which has attracted the attention of American courts.

Unfortunately, the privacy features offered by Tornado Cash have also been exploited by malicious actors. Hackers, criminals, and even sanctioned regimes have used the service to launder funds from illegal activities, such as cryptocurrency thefts and ransomware schemes.

The Role of Tornado Cash in Money Laundering

According to authorities, almost 75% of funds laundered on the Ethereum network went through Tornado Cash. Groups like Lazarus, linked to North Korea, are said to have used the service to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrencies. This misuse has led regulators to directly attack the protocol.

Source: https://www.elliptic.co

Developers' Limited Efforts to Limit Abuse

Although Tornado Cash developers attempted to implement filtering tools to block sanctioned addresses, these measures proved insufficient in the eyes of authorities. Critics pointed out that the service remained too easily accessible and permissive towards malicious users.

The controversial decision of the American authorities

Historic Sanctions against Tornado Cash

In August 2022, the Department of US Treasury took the unprecedented step of adding Tornado Cash to its list of tools to be sanctioned. The move banned all U.S. citizens from interacting with the protocol, effectively freezing funds held by users in the United States.

Following the sanctions, Dutch authorities arrested Alexey Pertsev, one of the main developers of Tornado Cash, accusing him of money laundering. His trial, held in 2023, was closely followed by the crypto community, which saw it as a litmus test for the future of digital privacy.

Finally, in May 2025, the final sentence was handed down: Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was found guilty and sentenced to 64 months jailed by a Dutch court. Authorities justified the move by claiming that Tornado Cash had become a large-scale money laundering tool, facilitating the laundering of more than $7 billion in cryptocurrencies from illegal activities. They highlighted the inability of developers to put effective controls in place to prevent this abuse.

Roman Storm's Rejection of the Indictment

In the United States, Roman Storm, another co-founder of Tornado Cash, filed a motion seeking reject the act charges against him to which he pleads not guilty. Its legal team argued that simply developing a decentralized privacy tool could not amount to money laundering.

Reactions from the Crypto Community

This decision sparked strong reactions within the crypto community, with some seeing it as an attack on privacy and technological innovation. Privacy advocates have argued that tools like Tornado Cash are essential to protecting dissidents and human rights activists living under repressive regimes.

Beyond individual cases, the Tornado Cash affair raised fundamental questions about the limits of regulation in a decentralized crypto environment. Many observers fear the move could pave the way for a broader crackdown on digital privacy tools, with potentially disastrous consequences for innovation and individual freedoms.

The persistence of Tornado Cash despite sanctions

Although authorities managed to temporarily disrupt the use of Tornado Cash by targeting its developers, the decentralized protocol continued to operate, demonstrating the difficulty of controlling such distributed systems.

The sanctions also put stablecoin issuers in a difficult position, forcing them to freeze funds linked to Tornado Cash, despite user protests. This situation has raised questions about the role of financial intermediaries in a supposedly decentralized ecosystem.

Implications for the Future of Crypto Privacy

In the long term, the Tornado Cash case could have a lasting impact on how regulators approach the issue of privacy in crypto. Some fear this could pave the way for increased surveillance and restrictions on privacy tools, hindering innovation and individual freedoms.

Conclusion: The need to strike a balance between privacy and security

The Tornado Cash affair illustrates the growing tension between aspirations for financial privacy and the imperatives of national security and anti-money laundering. As authorities seek to crack down on abuse, the crypto community is advocating for a more nuanced approach, one that would preserve fundamental rights while tackling malicious use.

Going forward, it will be essential to strike the right balance, developing clear and fair regulations that reconcile these divergent interests. Only such an approach can guarantee the sustainability of innovation and freedom in the crypto ecosystem, while protecting the security and freedom of citizens…

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