Anonymous User Transfers ETH To Prominent Figures Via Tornado Cash

The smart contract saw periodic 0.1 Ether (ETH) transactions emerge from the smart contract to well-known individuals like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. And American television host Jimmy Fallon, one day after the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash for its alleged involvement in cryptocurrency money laundering operations.

iexclusivenews reports that the Tornado Cash architecture makes it impossible to identify the origin of the transactions; therefore, either one person or a number of people or groups might be participating in the operation.

Sanctions prevent any U.S. individuals or organizations from conducting blockchain or commercial transactions utilizing Tornado Cash’s smart contract addresses. Willful disobedience is punishable by penalties of $50,000 to $10,000,000 and jail terms of 10 to 30 years.

The regularity of the transactions suggests that the sender (s) may be launching a practical joke in an effort to draw law enforcement’s attention to the recipients.

The Treasury sanctions, however, call for “willful” interaction with the blacklisted smart contract addresses as a prerequisite for any legal action.

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It is therefore improbable that receiving Tornado Cash tokens for free, without their knowledge or consent, could be considered a breach of the rules.

The sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses were put on a blacklist, and access to its front-end application was blocked, on the same day that Web3 development platforms Alchemy and Infura.io joined stablecoin issuer Circle and programming repository vault GitHub.

By blocking unauthorized wallets from using the program, Tornado Cash made an effort to allay long-standing worries that its platform was being exploited by bad hackers to launder stolen cryptocurrency payments.

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Roman Semenov, a co-founder of the project, said at the time that the instrument simply restricts access to the DApp interface and not the underlying smart contract.

By blocking unauthorized wallets from using the program, Tornado Cash made an effort to allay long-standing worries that its platform was being exploited by bad hackers to launder stolen cryptocurrency payments.

Roman Semenov, a co-founder of the project, said at the time that the instrument simply restricts access to the DApp interface and not the underlying smart contract.