No permission will be provided to the sanctioned addresses to interact with the front-end of Tornado Cash, however, that does not keep them from having an interaction with smart contract.

Tornado Cash endorses compliance

The platform has begun blocking consumers from reaching its front-end. The team at the back of the Ethereum protocol, having a prestige due to being utilized as a mixer for transactional privacy, shared a Twitter post on Friday verifying that the venue was benefitting from the oracle contract from Chainalysis (a security analytics company) to restrict Ethereum-based addresses against whom the Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued sanctions.

The Tornado Cash noted that sustaining the financial privacy counts to be their fundamental priority however they would not prefer it in return for non-compliance. The declaration also presented a link of Etherscan to Chainalysis’ contract, indicating that since 10th March addition of 3 addresses has been made to the list. It is witnessed a day following the news that Lazarus Group from North Korea was at the back of an attack of nearly $550M on Ronin Network that occurred on 23rd March.

An update was posted on the behalf of the Treasury Department that it had included an Ethereum address to the sanctions list thereof. After that, Chainalysis shared a series of tweets asserting that it had marked the address in the products offered by it. Tornado Cash counts to be advantageous to obfuscate the transfer history over Ethereum because it permits the consumers to deposit their funds to a contract and withdraw them out of a different address, making it additionally complicated to trail back the assets.

The community reacts

As this facility provides anonymity, it has become a well-known instrument among the hackers across the DeFi (decentralized finance) space to launder the funds. The history of Tornado Cash describes it to have a censorship-resistant as well as permissionless nature, however, the exclusive step taken by it to abide by the regulations has triggered a considerable critical response from the community, referring to it as a move in a direct contradiction with the true decentralization.

Several famous crypto consumers reacted to the post of Tornado Cash to condemn the team over the respective decision. In the words of a Twitter user with the pseudonym “basedkarbon,” they require another mixer. It is noteworthy here that although the addresses can be blocked by an oracle from utilizing the application of Tornado Cash,  they are not stopped by it from having a direct interaction with the smart contract.