Tornado Cash cryptomixer code uploaded to GitHub again

Last month, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blacklisted Tornado Cash, a service that allowed users to send and receive Ethereum anonymously. American citizens are now prohibited from interacting with an application that hides the origin of transactions. GitHub, a website that allows developers to share open source code with users, has removed the cryptomixer code from its platform.

In late August, Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, re-uploaded the Tornado Cash code to the site. The scientist claimed that he did it for educational and research purposes. «I have used the Tornado Cash source code extensively to teach concepts related to cryptocurrency privacy. Theloss or reduction of the availability of this source code will harm the scientific and tech communities,» the scientist explained his action. And today, Ethereum developers have discovered that the original code of the tool is again available to everyone.

Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon, who was one of those who urged Github to unlock the Tornado Cash code repositories, announced the news on his Twitter account.

.@github has unbanned the @TornadoCash organization and contributors on their platform! t.co/ktdghDQKx8 https://t.co/Md17vFE9DZ

— prestonvanloon. eth (@preston_vanloon) September 22, 2022

A representative of the GitHub website also commented on the situation: «GitHub wants to be a global platform for fruitful developer communication. We are carefully studying the government sanctions and want to make sure that users and customers are not affected. We are committed to protecting open source work around the world.»

To remind you of the situation with Tornado Cash, the United States imposed sanctions that prohibit American citizens and businesses from using the cryptomixer’s services. A few days after the sanctions were imposed, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was detained in Amsterdam. The developer was defended by many members of the cryptocurrency community, human rights activists, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson. Opil Pertsev was also accused of collaborating with the FSB.

Recently, cryptocurrency analysts from Chainalysis analyzed the US government’s sanctions policy against the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash. Experts believe that the banned service will be replaced by others. Chainalisys assured that there is a «hole» in the cryptocurrency industry that needs to be filled, so lesser-known projects will compete for the same level of popularity as Tornado Cash.