Note that some users have used the Tornado Cash sanctions situation to make similar jokes. Specifically, on Wednesday, one unknown rich person took to withdrawing 0.1 ETH each to popular celebrity blockchain addresses like host Jimmy Fallon, blogger Logan Paul, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, Coinbase executive Brian Armstrong and others. This is evidenced by data from the blockchain.

Cryptocurrency withdrawals to celebrity addresses with Tornado Cash

Anthony Sassalo, a well-known fan of Etherium, has been a victim of such actions. As he noted today, his address was banned from interacting with the frontend of the popular Aave platform due to receiving coins from Tornado Cash as part of the sanctions. Here is the relevant screenshot.

Address blocking on the Aave platform

What’s wrong with Tornado Cash?

The Tornado Cash platform was launched in 2019 as a tool to increase the privacy of cryptocurrency transactions with a public blockchain. Tornado Cash works on the principle of user coin mixing, so that it ends up being very difficult from the outside to link the original cryptocurrency wallets of the sender and the same transfer recipient at a different address.

Tornado Cash

The privacy provided by Tornado Cash has long been criticised by US and other government agencies. On Monday, the US Treasury Department, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control, took decisive action – Tornado Cash, along with a large set of crypto addresses associated with the service, was added to the Treasury Department’s blacklist. In essence, this means a complete ban on the use of the platform by Americans, with violations of this directive being punishable.

Read also: Cryptocurrency mixers are being used more heavily than ever in 2022. What does it mean.

The arrest of one of the suspected developers of Tornado Cash was accompanied by the following comment from FIOD representatives.

FIOD officials arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam on Wednesday 10 August. He is suspected of concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering by mixing cryptocurrencies through the decentralised cryptomixer Tornado Cash.

Again, the developers only wrote the code, which can be used either negatively or positively. However, because of the activity of people using Tornado Cash to launder money, the developer has somehow come under the radar.

According to Cointelegraph sources, FIOD’s cybercrime unit launched a criminal investigation against Tornado Cash back in June this year. The platform has long been suspected of carrying out particularly large transactions linked to the underworld. This includes proceeds from hacking attacks and fraudulent schemes. Here’s a relevant quote.

Among the turnover of the transfers were funds stolen as a result of a hack by a hacker group allegedly linked to North Korea.

Tornado Cash’s list of blocked resources

The developer’s arrest was received negatively by the cryptocurrency community, Decrypt reports. Many said the event was a direct attack on the freedom of speech that is open source software. Here’s what crypto-enthusiast Ryan Adams tweeted about it.

They have arrested the developer of Tornado Cash. I’ll say it again: the man was arrested for letting people keep their privacy online. They put the man in jail because some bad people were using his open source code. That shouldn’t happen in a free society.

There is some truth in this - if the suspect was only involved in development, he was hardly involved in money laundering and other sins.

However, on the whole, such law enforcement activity has proved too harsh. The example here is banks, which are regularly caught for money laundering, but always get away with it. Deutsche Bank is particularly notorious in this regard.

This is exactly what a prominent member of the cryptocurrency community nicknamed Bitlord brought up. Here is his rejoinder from Twitter.

OK, when are we going to start arresting bank employees because of criminals holding accounts in them?

Deutsche Bank

That said, another popular member of the blockchain community, Coby, who has 722,000 followers, has allowed for a more complicated situation. He suggests that the guy who was arrested could have been not only a developer but also linked to organised crime. That is, his connection with Tornado Cash could be just a part of the bigger picture.

By the way, the arrestee’s identity is already known. According to The Block, it turned out to be Alexey Pertsev.

Zuku Wilcox, founder of Zcash, a cryptocurrency project that focuses specifically on user privacy, responded to the developments. He said that “privacy is normal,” and that ordinary people need it too, not just criminals.

Anyway, so far the Tornado Cash situation has not been affected in any way. Specifically, the platform’s Discord server was deleted yesterday, although at the time of writing the community group on Telegram was still up and running. Consequently, the community was also affected.


We believe that such actions of the authorities do seem too harsh and unfair, taking into account that banks are only fined for money laundering. The developers should not be responsible for how their product is used by other people. So there is a possibility that this is not just about Tornado Cash, as Coby suggested. The answers to what's going on will take time anyway.

Stay tuned to our millionaire cryptochat. There, we will tell you about other important developments affecting the blockchain industry.