The arrest of the developer of the cryptocurrency project Tornado Cash helped the growth of the USDT token

The capitalization of the Tether stablecoin (USDT) has increased by almost $ 2 billion, thanks to the US government’s sanctions against the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash and the arrest of the project’s developer.

As it became known, USDT’s capitalization increased after Circle, following the US Treasury Department’s ban, blocked 44 USDC addresses associated with Tornado Cash. After that, investors transferred their savings from USDC to USDT in the amount of about $ 1.6 billion, which increased the capitalization of USDT.

At the time of writing, the USDT issuer has not yet commented on the imposition of sanctions against Tornado Cash. According to users, the long silence may mean that the company does not plan to comply with the restrictions.

Interestingly, the value of Tornado Cash’s native token TORN dropped by 25% after the detention of the mixing service developer. Thus, the price of TORN has fallen by about 97% since its all-time high on February 13, 2021.

As a reminder, the United States has imposed sanctions prohibiting American citizens and businesses from using Tornado Cash services. In addition, API and node infrastructure providers, which are considered the backbone of the Ethereum and Web3 ecosystems, have begun blocking remote procedure call (RPC) requests to Tornado Cash. The move to block RPC requests prevents anyone using Alchemy or Infura in the background from accessing Tornado Cash. A few days ago, law enforcement agencies detained the alleged developer of Tornado Cash in Amsterdam and immediately held a court hearing. The developer of the mixer is suspected of laundering stolen cryptocurrencies and collaborating with criminals.