- Coin Center sees the action filed today as crucial to the protection of users’ privacy.
- Coinbase filed a federal lawsuit against the US Treasury last month.
Crypto policy-focused non-profit ‘Coin Center’ on Wednesday sued the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), alleging that OFAC exceeded its power by making illegal the use of Tornado Cash, an Ethereum coin-mixing tool.
Coin Center filed an action against the Tornado Cash ban on Wednesday, making good on a pledge made in the days after the unilateral removal of the crypto privacy tool and a number of wallet addresses affiliated with it.
It was argued by OFAC at the time that the Tornado Cash was used to launder money by bad actors like the North Korean state-sponsored hacking organization the Lazarus Group because it obfuscates the trails of normally public Ethereum transactions by mixing many transactions together and rendering them untraceable.
User Privacy a Major Concern
Many in the crypto community reacted angrily to the US government’s decision to add the tool to a list normally designated for terrorist groups and foreign states, arguing that the move constitutes an open declaration of war on user privacy.
The executive team at Coin Center sees the action filed today as crucial to the protection of users’ privacy and the long-term viability of the cryptocurrency industry.
Coinbase, another cryptocurrency exchange, filed a federal lawsuit against the US Treasury last month, and today’s action in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida is identical to that one. The main claim in the case was that OFAC had broken the law by prohibiting an innocuous piece of open-source software referring to Tornado Cash as a permissionless, decentralized tool that operates without the oversight of a parent organization.
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