Colin Wu said that he had not used the OpenSea marketplace for several months, when he suddenly received an account blocking message due to violation of OFAC (U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control) rules. After a little investigation, the journalist realized that the blocking was due to the use of the Tornado Cash mixer. A similar problem was identified with several other users.
Now the US authorities have included most of the addresses of Tornado Cash in the sanctions list. In addition, co-founders of the service Alexey Pertsev and Roman Shtorm were arrested. Storm was later released on bail. As Colin Wu emphasized, the investigation is still ongoing, so the position of the OpenSea service is not very clear. It seems that the management of the NFT site has taken a “proactive stance” towards users who previously worked with Tornado Cash.
The journalist stressed that other NFT trading platforms continue to work without blocking. As well as other DeFi projects. Wu reminded that blocking an account on OpenSea does not interfere with working on other services and trading cryptocurrencies. However, he warned: if the user actively uses this NFT marketplace, one should refrain from interacting with Tornado Cash smart contracts. That is, either use a different mixer or a different address.
American users of Tornado Cash even filed a lawsuit against the US Treasury Department, arguing that the ban on open source software violates the constitution. However, Themis was not impressed with the arguments and the claim was rejected.
Source: Bits
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