Tornado Cash Spins Up Sanctions-compliant Web Interface

The ether transaction privacy service made a bid to curtail the laundering of Ronin hack proceeds

article-image

Source: Tornado Cash

share

key takeaways

  • The Tornado Cash front-end website will prevent access from OFAC-sanctioned wallet addresses
  • The immutable smart contracts underpinning the mixing service remain unchanged, and therefore function the same as before

The privacy tool Tornado Cash, which has been used to obfuscate the proceeds of multiple frauds, scams and hacks in the past, updated its web front-end on Friday to limit access from wallet addresses sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Loading Tweet..

The move follows an update from OFAC yesterday, which identified the wallet known to have received the funds stolen from the Ronin Bridge last month as controlled by the North Korean hacking organization Lazarus Group. The wallet still contains 144,000 of the original 173,000 ether, worth about $439 million as of Friday at 1:30 pm ET.

The change to Tornado Cash’s decentralized application (dapp) has no impact on the underlying privacy protocols’ code — a set of smart contracts on Ethereum meant to bring some measure of privacy to transactions on the transparent public blockchain network.

Understanding the difference between a protocol and a website that adds ease-of-use is not always easy for newcomers to Web3, as evidenced by the recent Uniswap class action lawsuit.

In the Web2 world of Google and Facebook, a website runs on a server owned by a company that exists in some country’s jurisdiction. In the case of Tornado Cash, the smart contract code runs on public Ethereum and cannot be changed, the project’s documentation explains.

“Nobody — including the original developers — can modify or shut them down,” the documentation says.

The service is even accessible from decentralized storage infrastructure known as IPFS rather than on any particular centralized web server.

So, what does this mean for the hackers?

The main user interface to Tornado Cash is an application that implements a Chainalysis sanctions oracle — basically a blacklist of Ethereum addresses maintained by the blockchain data platform Chainalysis. The address used in the Ronin hack has been added to that list.

But the Tornado Cash protocol itself can still be used as before, using an alternative front-end user interface. That doesn’t mean it can be used successfully to obscure the origins of the ether stolen in the Ronin bridge exploit, however.

Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin has touted the firm’s ability to unmask transactions from mixers like Tornado Cash, especially when they contain large amounts of value relative to the total liquidity available.

“The fact that all of the industry and all of law enforcement and the regulatory authorities can all have access to that same information about what services and what entities are behind these transactions, that allows us to take unprecedented steps in being able to collaborate on weeding out illicit activity,” Levin told a Senate panel in March.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template.jpg

Research

The BitcoinOS team is the first to have developed and posted a ZK-compressed proof on the Bitcoin network. Other proof verification efforts have been limited to the Signet or testnet deployments. Their work has resulted in the development of BitSNARK, a software library for ZK-compressed fraud proofs on the Bitcoin network. The project aims to provide a horizontal scaling solution, offering a one-stop shop for teams interested in developing a rollup on Bitcoin. This approach shares similarities with the horizontal tech stack scaling in other ecosystems like Cosmos and Optimism, particularly in its focus on simplified verification, bridging standards, and lightweight interoperability.

/

article-image

A16z’s State of Crypto report shows that DeFi has the largest number of daily active addresses, with stablecoins following closely behind

article-image

G2 is delivering real-world performance breakthroughs at 50-100 Mgas/s, Conduit says

article-image

World Liberty Financial’s token sale debuted just as an absurd AI-fueled memecoin captured crypto’s attention

article-image

Coinbase hired History Associates in 2023 to assist in retrieving records from the SEC and FDIC

article-image

Hours after pledging to support Black men’s rights to safely invest in crypto, VP Harris’s Monday night speech mentioned blockchain zero times