Technology is not guilty, but the developers Roman and others will not have their charges dismissed.
Written by: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily
This morning, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal posted on X: "Privacy rights win. Today, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal. This is a historic victory for cryptocurrency and all those who care about defending freedom." Uniswap's founder called it "immutable smart contracts defeating the Treasury in court."
After the news broke, the Tornado Cash protocol token TORN rapidly rose, going from a low of $3.7 to a high of $43 in one hour.
What is the specific content of the ruling and what impact does it have on users, agreements, and related assets? Odaily will interpret this in the article.
Interpretation of agreement impacts
Background of the story
In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) placed Tornado Cash on its sanctions list (SDN), after which multiple countries including Germany, France, and South Korea conducted investigations, warnings, and sanctions against Tornado.
Regarding the U.S. OFAC sanctions, it can be simply summarized as:
Access is prohibited, including shutting down front-end websites and prohibiting technical access;
Interaction is prohibited, banning all entities, citizens, and other subjects under U.S. jurisdiction from interacting with Tornado Cash, covering financial institutions, cryptocurrency platforms, wallet providers, etc.;
Prohibition of fund movement, forbidding U.S. financial institutions and cryptocurrency trading platforms from having any inflow or outflow of funds related to Tornado Cash.
Freezing assets, assets owned or controlled by Tornado Cash within the U.S., including virtual currencies, are frozen.
In addition, in May 2024, one of the founders of Tornado Cash, core developer, and 31-year-old Russian citizen Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to 5 years and 4 months in prison in the Netherlands for laundering $2.2 billion on a cryptocurrency mixer platform.
In September of this year, the criminal case against Roman Storm, one of the developers of Tornado Cash, will enter trial proceedings. The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Storm and his colleague Roman Semenov with three charges, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transfer business, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, with charges involving assisting the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group in laundering over $1 billion.
Court ruling and impact
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal stated: "Tornado Cash will be removed from the sanctions list, and Americans will once again be allowed to use this privacy protection protocol. In other words, the government's overreach will not continue."
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams pointed out that the key content in the ruling document is: "We believe that the immutable smart contracts of Tornado Cash (supporting privacy software code lines) are not 'property' of foreign nationals or entities, which means (1) they cannot be blocked under IEEPA, and (2) OFAC has exceeded the powers granted to it by Congress." (For specific analysis, see the last section)
Protocol revenue and token impact
After being sanctioned by OFAC in 2022, Tornado Cash's TVL plummeted, but due to historical accumulation and depth of the liquidity pool, Tornado remains the preferred mixer for hackers, with its TVL gradually rebounding.
Although the front end is blocked, hackers directly call the on-chain smart contracts for mixing coins; the sanctions have little impact on these 'core users'. The author believes that the 'fundamental income' of TORN will not undergo significant changes due to the ruling, and the main factors affecting the token's rise and fall are changes in sentiment and confidence. Therefore, although this morning TORN rose tenfold within an hour, it subsequently fell nearly 70% in the next two hours. Readers are advised to focus on news and sentiment as the core judgment basis for future prices.
Will it affect Roman's trial?
After the Fifth Circuit Court's ruling was released, users consulted Consensys lawyer Bill Hughes asking, 'Will Roman be released?'
The response to Bill is: "This is completely another matter. This does not mean that Tornado Cash is not a service, but rather that the immutable smart contracts included in the software as part of the platform are not a service. The U.S. Department of Justice states that Roman operates a service that violates sanctions, illegally transfers funds, and facilitates money laundering, which does not change these allegations."
Core content of the ruling
This section specifically explains the logic and basis of the Fifth Circuit Court's ruling that the U.S. Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts are illegal. Readers may choose to read selectively.
Tornado Cash is not a service
OFAC argues: Smart contracts are essentially a service because they can be used by users to perform specific types of operations (such as anonymous transactions).
Court's view: Immutable smart contracts do not require human operation. Even according to the Treasury's definition, immutable smart contracts are merely lines of code, and rather than being a 'service', they are better described as tools used to provide services.
Tornado Cash is not property
According to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), targets of OFAC sanctions must be 'property' or 'property' in which a foreign national has an interest.
The smart contracts of Tornado Cash are immutable, decentralized code that no economic entity can control, and these smart contracts cannot be owned. More than a thousand volunteers participated in a trusted setup ceremony to "irreversibly remove anyone's ability to update, remove, or control these lines of code." Therefore, no one can exclude others from using the Tornado Cash pool smart contracts. Even under the OFAC sanctions regime, it cannot prevent North Korean hackers from extracting assets, so Tornado Cash does not belong to property that can be sanctioned.
In law, the government can only sanction entities that meet the definitions of 'property' or 'services'. If something is neither property nor a service, the sanctions lose their legal basis.
(Note: For detailed court ruling documents, see the original text.)