Tornado Developer Arrested As its Network Shutdown

• Alexey Pertsev, a developer of Tornado Cash, was arrested by Dutch officials.
• Tornado Cash DAO reportedly went offline.

Ethereum (ETH) network’s “Merge” has been ready for the switch to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), at this time Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service built on the Ethereum blockchain has turned into a hot topic. The Office of Foreign Asset Control of the United States Treasury Department recently levied sanctions which led to the shutdown of the Tornado Cash DAO.

At the time of writing, The Tornado Cash DAO reportedly went offline after a discussion in which the community generally decided to add its governance layer as a signatory to its multi-sig wallet, which has around $21.6 million.

It’s unclear what prompted the decentralized autonomous organization to go offline, but it happened after a range of actions made by various public and private organizations in response to the U.S authorities.

Behind the Scene 

Earlier this week, Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the US Treasury Department. Following that, several organizations have started to distance themselves from Tornado Cash’s services. And Roman Semenov, a co-founder, said on Monday that his GitHub account had been disabled and several other websites to Tornado Cash have been blocked or shuttered. 

Also, the Circle froze more than 75,000 USD Coin (USDC) worth of funds at addresses listed by Treasury officials over the previous four days. Additionally, the crypto exchange dYdX announced on Thursday, that it had blocked some users’ accounts with funds connected to Tornado Cash. And the requests for the crypto mixer’s remote procedure call were also denied by Alchemy and Infura.io.

Furthermore, On Friday, Dutch officials in charge of monitoring financial crimes announced that the authority arrested Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev who was suspected of involvement in money laundering. Following that,  the Tornado Cash Discord Server was shut down on the same day.

Before the sanctions were implemented, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he donated money to Ukraine using Tornado Cash to protect the victims’ financial security while they were in a war-torn country.

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