The post TORN Price Spikes as Tornado Cash Gets Removed from OFAC Blacklist appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

TORN has skyrocketed by more than 60% after the U.S. Treasury revoked its sanctions on the crypto-mixing protocol. Tornado Cash’s co-developers remain entangled in legal issues, with Roman Storm set to stand trial in July 2025. The cryptocurrency community saw a major shift on March 21 as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) officially removed Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based privacy tool, from its sanctions list. The decision to lift the sanctions comes amid a broader shift in U.S. crypto policy under the Trump administration, which has taken a more favorable stance on digital assets. With several prominent crypto advocates appointed to senior government positions, the administration has signaled a move toward a more crypto-friendly regulatory approach. Tornado Cash is a decentralized protocol designed to enhance transaction privacy on the Ethereum blockchain by allowing users to mix their funds, making transaction trails harder to trace. In August 2022, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the protocol, accusing it of facilitating the laundering of over $7 billion in cryptocurrencies, including $455 million allegedly linked to North Korean hackers, the Lazarus Group. This marked the first time a decentralized protocol faced such sanctions, igniting debates over the regulatory reach of open-source software. Legal Challenge and Court Ruling The sanctions against Tornado Cash faced strong legal opposition from its users, backed by major industry players like Coinbase. Plaintiffs argued that OFAC had overstepped its authority, as Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts could not be classified as “property” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Their argument gained traction, and in November 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor, stating that OFAC had indeed exceeded its statutory authority by sanctioning the protocol’s smart contracts. Following the court’s decision, OFAC conducted a review and…

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Filed under: News - @ March 23, 2025 7:20 am