What is Tornado Cash Crypto Mixer?
Tornado Cash is in legal trouble, the cryptocurrency mixer has been shut down. Tornado Cash Crypto Mixer was a platform that allowed crypto traders to make transactions in an anonymous way.
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Video credit: CoffeeZilla YouTube Channel
What Is Tornado Cash Crypto Mixer?
Tornado Cash Crypto Mixer was a platform that allowed crypto traders to make transactions in an anonymous way. Basically, a swap protocol that scrambled transactions by creating multiple transactions between multiple users before sending the crypto to the receiving address. This process used numerous wallet addresses with varying amounts of cryptocurrency to disguise transactions so users could avoid having their funds tracked.
Video credit: Whiteboard Crypto YouTube Channel
Arrest Of The Alleged Tornado Cash Developer
Even though many people interested in decentralized finance strongly advocate privacy, centralized governments have been passing sanctions that make protocols like Tornado Cash illegal to use. The sanction on Tornado Cash may affect many people down the road, for now, it seems that most of the attention has been focused on the developer.
Dutch authorities have arrested someone who allegedly contributed to the open-source Tornado Cash cryptocurrency tumbler on Ethereum. The full story is not yet known, though many cryptocurrency and privacy advocates were immediately troubled by the prospect of criminalizing the code.
We know the person arrested was a 29-year-old male, and apprehended in Amsterdam. We know Tornado Cash is a service used to anonymize crypto transactions that was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department on Monday. We know Dutch financial regulators opened a criminal investigation into that service in June.
The coder, however, was only “suspected” of helping to code Tornado Cash. And, likewise, only “suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering,” according to the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD).
We do not know the full implications of this move, how wide the probe is or what it might mean for crypto in future. “Multiple arrests are not ruled out,” the Dutch financial investigators said in a statement.
Two Sides Of The Tornado
Cryptocurrency sanctions and trending across many governments, that claim to be concerned with the potential for money laundering and tax evasion. Unfortunately, not everyone is supportive of the financial privacy opportunities that are possible with decentralized finance.
The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control on Monday sanctioned crypto platform Tornado Cash, which North Korean hackers have used for laundering.
Although fingers point to Tornado Cash as a tool for illegal activities, many have used Tornado Cash for legitimate purposes. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin admits to using Tornado Cash to donate cryptocurrency to Ukraine.
“I'll out myself as someone who has used [Tornado Cash] to donate to this exact cause,” Vitalik Buterin said on Twitter, referring to the protocol that enables users to make more private crypto transactions.
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Addition Resources On Tornado Cash
