ETH wallet sanctions list is ineffective when using Tornado Cash

The Tornado Cash service has released a statement blocking access to its interface for addresses that have been sanctioned by OFAC (the US Office of Foreign Assets Control). The team announced this on its official Twitter account:

Tornado Cash uses @chainalysis oracle contract to block OFAC sanctioned addresses from accessing the dapp.
Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance.https://t.co/tzZe7bVjZt

— Tornado. cash (@TornadoCash) April 15, 2022

Tornado Cash made its statement the day after the scandal with the North Korean hacker group Lazarus. The U.S. Treasury Department is confident that these hackers are behind the Ronin Network situation and, accordingly, conducted a $ 625 million operation to steal money from the Axie Infinity game (by the way, the game players will be reimbursed over the next two years).

However, back on April 16, we reported that such a move was ineffective — Lazarus hackers simply transferred money from a sanctioned wallet to a clean wallet, and then withdrew the funds through the world’s largest money laundering service.

Since this event, the crypto community has become increasingly outraged by what is happening, but Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, confirmed that this approach to resolving the situation is ineffective: «Nothing prevents you from sending money from an unauthorized address to a new one and immediately passing it through TornadoCash. The list is managed by Chainalysis, and they simply forward what the state sanctions.»

Biden, don’t sleep!