Users of the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash complain against the US government in a new lawsuit

Users of the cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, which has been sanctioned by the US, have filed a lawsuit against the US government, as the mixer’s customers consider the bans to be illegal.

As it became known, the lawsuit against the US Treasury Department is funded by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which has sided with Tornado Cash users. According to the plaintiffs, the sanctions imposed on the mixer are a violation of the constitutional rights of Americans and a clear example of how the US government exceeds its authority. Tornado Cash (unlike the Blender mixer) is open source and decentralized, meaning that Tornado Cash is not owned by any particular person or organization.

According to the plaintiffs, they used Tornado Cash exclusively for legitimate purposes. Thus, some users sent donations to help Ukraine through the mixer to protect their public data. It is worth reminding that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency, did exactly the same. According to Buterin, he used a cryptocurrency mixer to transfer financial aid to Ukrainians (in April, he sent 1500 ETH to the accounts of Ukrainian charities). The co-founder of Ethereum took this step because he did not want the Russian government to have information about the transferred funds and to track Buterin’s actions.

It is worth noting that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong decided to finance a lawsuit against the US Treasury for two reasons: to protect innocent users and to prevent the US government from suppressing the development of innovative technologies. Armstrong announced this in his blog on September 8: «The new sanctions have harmed innocent people and jeopardized the development of cryptocurrency privacy protocols.»

Regarding the situation with Tornado Cash, the United States imposed sanctions that prohibit American citizens and businesses from using Tornado Cash 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, and co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson. After that, Pertsev was accused of collaborating with the FSB.