Popular cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash was added last month to the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which sparked a backlash from proponents of free speech and privacy. After that, Microsoft-owned GitHub withdrew the project’s source code and deleted the accounts of three people who contributed code to it.
In a recent development, the platform unbanned the platform’s coin mixer and donors. Preston Van Loon, an Ethereum developer, tweeted that the repositories are currently in “read-only” mode but that the hosting service has not yet undone all of its changes and restored the repositories to their previous state.
Loon considers the action to be “progress from an outright ban” still.
Clarification on Tornado Cash Interaction
Following clarification instructions released by the US Department of the Treasury earlier this month, which stated that merely “interacting” with итs open-source code, with specific limitations, would not breach penalties imposed by the OFAC, Tornado Cash has returned to GitHub.
According to the guidelines, no illegal transactions should be involved in the encounter. Before penalties are put in place on August 8th, people who want to use the mixer can apply for an OFAC license to carry out the transaction or withdraw money.
The Unofficial Archive of Tornado Cash
With the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Johns Hopkins University professor of cryptography Matthew Green published an unauthorized repository of Tornado Cash’s code in August, in addition to the partial repair (EFF). The researcher and his EFF colleague Kurt Opsahl criticized the hosting site’s earlier action and declared that they would sue if the code was ever again removed.
Although the future of Tornado Cash is still in doubt, the campaign did manage to win over a lot of industry support.One company, Coinbase, disclosed that it was paying for a lawsuit that six citizens of the nation filed against the Department of Treasury.
In a statement, the exchange said that the OFAC put sanctions on open source technology, “a tool legitimately used by many innocent people even if also by some evil actors,” rather than the bad actors or the property they controlled.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/10/24/github-reverses-tornado-cash-ban-but-theres-a-catch/