Preston Van Loon said in a Twitter post, “.@github has unbanned the @TornadoCash organization and contributors on their platform!”
Ethereum coin mixer, Tornado Cash, is finally back on the software hosting website, GitHub.
Recall that sometime last month, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blacklisted Tornado Cash. According to OFAC, they did so because criminals, including the Lazarus group (North Korean state-sponsored hacking group), were using it for money laundering.
Tornado Cash enables users to send and receive Ethereum anonymously. Following its blacklisting by OFAC, American citizens were banned from using the app.
Like numerous other platforms, GitHub, a software hosting website that enables developers to share code, also removed the tool’s code from its website following the announcement by OFAC.
This move by GitHub did not sit well with some of the Ethereum community members. Preston Van Loon, one of the Ethereum core developers, called out OFAC for their decision.
He said in a tweet,
“Today I joined five other plaintiffs in challenging the U.S. Treasury’s and OFAC’s sanctions against @TornadoCash, a piece of software running on Ethereum. I did not take this decision lightly. Code is speech and free speech is a constitutional right worth protecting.”
Preston also called out the software hosting website stating,
“Hey @github, please unban @TornadoCash code repositories now. OFAC has stated: U.S. persons would not be prohibited by U.S. sanctions regulations from copying the open-source code and making it available online for others to view."
Finally, after so much criticism against the Feds for the ban, the Tornado Cash code is back up on GitHub. Although GitHub is yet to explain why it is back up, some Ethereum developers have already announced it.
Preston’s Twitter announcement read,
“.@github has unbanned the @TornadoCash organization and contributors on their platform!”
It is worth noting that the Feds accused Tornado Cash of processing about $7 billion worth of illegal transactions since its launch in 2019. But, a report by Elliptic countered the claim by revealing that of the $7.6 billion worth of transactions on the app, only about $1.5 billion is from fraudulent activities.
