Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol that allows users to hide the flow of crypto assets, has passed its first governance proposal since the US Treasury Department (OFAC) imposed sanctions on it in August. The proposal makes tornadocash.eth, the protocol’s Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain, point to a new community-built interface for Tornado Cash. The previous interface relied on a hosted version of The Graph, a data protocol that dropped support for Tornado Cash after the sanctions, as Micah Zoltu, an engineer, told The Defiant.
Tornado Cash
The proposal, unanimously approved on Dec. 13, also addressed other “weak points” in the interface, Zoltu said. A user who voted with almost 20,000 TORN tokens left a note about Alexey Pertsev, the programmer who contributed to Tornado Cash and who is currently imprisoned in the Netherlands.
Message from TORN’s biggest voter “[O voto] it means that Tornado Cash is truly a community project and not just a fake community project like many,” said Zoltu. “It means there are still people out there who really care about making the world a better place and aren’t just in it for the money.” Indeed, the OFAC sanctions, along with Pertsev’s arrest days later, galvanized the crypto industry like few other events. Coinbase, for example, funded a lawsuit to lift sanctions. Meanwhile, the Coin Center, a non-profit advocacy group for cryptocurrencies, has also sued the US Treasury Department. In light of Tornado Cash’s ambiguous legal status, it’s noteworthy that at least some people were willing to vote on the proposal. “As a TORN holder, you are certainly exposing yourself to complex legal risks by participating,” tweeted Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, a sidechain of the Ethereum network.
Community Control
The Tornado Cash community’s ability to modify the project shows that the protocol can operate independently of its previous leadership. 🇧🇷[A aprovação] indicates to the Dutch government that Alexey does not run things. So he must be released,” Zoltu said. A crucial element of crypto protocols is the idea that developers can deploy open source code that they have no control over, depending on the implementation. As an extension of this, developers can deploy immutable code that cannot prevent users from interacting with it. Going forward, the Tornado Cash community has indicated that they will continue to support the project despite OFAC sanctions. OFAC cited money laundering as a reason for imposing sanctions. That’s because North Korean hacking group Lazarus has been linked to two $100 million hacks in 2021 using Tornado Cash in the cases.
‘Unstoppable’
With a successful proposal, the project is perhaps testing the resilience of blockchain protocols in a way that none of them have done so far. Another proposal will follow the first, according to the newly created twitter account of the Tornado Cash Community, which rates the protocol as “unstoppable”. With unprecedented hardships ahead, Tornado DAO is breaking new ground in the crypto space. “This is a watershed for DAO resilience,” tweeted Köppelmann before the proposal was approved. “Can TornadoDAO, in the face of sanctions and heavy legal uncertainty, continue to operate?” Tornado Cash Passes First Governance Proposal Since Sanctions with authorization from The Defiant
Notice: The text presented in this column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of CriptoFácil. Read also: Ex-CEO of BitMEX files R$ 18 million lawsuit against platform Read also: SBF must testify in court this Monday; find out what he might say Read also: OKX is unable to process transactions for more than a day due to problems with Alibaba Cloud
