IG News Updates,
When the US government announced sanctions against Tornado Cash last August, the warning seemed aimed at all crypto mixers.
Alleging that Tornado Cash was used to launder $7 billion in digital currency – including half a billion dollars tied to Lazarus, a North Korean-sponsored hacking group – the US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control said that Any service that “indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions” represents a “threat to US national security”.
This definition fits most mixers, which are typically used to obscure the originators and recipients of crypto transactions by pooling funds from large numbers of people. Until depositors withdraw their funds to different addresses, it is not clear whose crypto belongs to whom.
Under the sanctions – which have been challenged in court – US residents are no longer legally allowed to access Tornado Cash. Separately, one of the service’s developers, Alexey Pertsev, is being held in custody in the Netherlands on suspicion of “concealing criminal financial flows and involvement in facilitating money laundering.”
But one of the early architects of the Tornado Cash project, Amin Soleimani, has announced that he is launching Approved Mixer, a successor to Privacy Pool, which he says will still protect users while discouraging money laundering and other Will allow for private, largely untraceable transactions. illegal activities.
“If Americans want privacy, we have to figure out how to work within the regulatory paradigm,” Suleimani says.
Soleimani announces sequel to Tornado Cash on Twitter On 26 February, it only revealed its name and support from MolochDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that grants grants to developers building apps for the Ethereum blockchain, and with which Soleimani is closely associated.
On March 4 at ETH Denver, he plans to unveil a rudimentary demo that limits the amount of funds that can go through the service because the code hasn’t yet been properly audited for bugs. “It’s not a ‘put all your money’ like a launch, it’s a ‘let’s start the conversation’ kind of thing,” Suleimani says.
That conversation, he says, is about whether it is technically possible to satisfy authorities that they need to trace the passage of stolen cryptocurrency, while still giving crypto users the financial privacy they are seeking. Is.