A tweet that showed a tease for a probable comeback of contentious Ethereum (ETH) transaction mixer Tornado Cash was posted by Ameen Soleimani, the co-founder of SpankChain and Reflex Labs on Sunday, February 26th.Â
I sincerely hope no one thought we were finished pic.twitter.com/YVpSMtjeCd
— ameen.eth (@ameensol) February 26, 2023
Based on the tweet, Soleimani mentioned that even after all the regulatory pressure placed on Tornado Cash, the crypto mixer is far from finished as supposedly perceived by many people.
Ethereum-based Decentralized Autonomous Organisation Moloch DAO shares a similar sentiment with the SpankChain co-founder as it replied to the latter’s tweet with an image of a Tornado. Also, there are speculations that Moloch DAO may be crucial to the financing of the Tornado Cash development as it does with other Ethereum projects.
Tornado Cash, like every other crypto mixer or tumbler, is used legally by crypto traders and every other well-meaning entity to obfuscate their crypto assets either for privacy reasons or other causes. Different entities bring their crypto assets together in a mixing pool where they are ‘blended’ and distributed in smaller units to hide their source and their owners’ identity. This is most time possible because Know-Your-Customer (KYC) is not required here.
Crypto Criminals Leverage Tornado Cash
Over time, it was discovered that a larger percentage of Tornado’s users were criminals including hackers who are trying to redirect their loot from the eyes of the authorities and other watchdogs. According to blockchain audit company Certik, Tornado Cash was one of the tools employed to launder the digital assets stolen in 2022. North Korean hacker Lazarus Group was named as one of the crypto mixer’s most frequent users.
However, the United States authorities caught up with the cryptocurrency mixer in August last year and imposed a sanction on it for its involvement in laundering up to $7 billion in digital assets. As part of the sanction, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blocked all assets in the U.S. which belong to Tornado Cash.
Not long after, 29-year-old Alexey Pertsev was arrested in Amsterdam by the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) in connection to Tornado Cash. Pertsev was allegedly the core developer behind the advanced technology of the controversial crypto mixer.
