Tornado Cash is officially safe from the penalties in the US, following a District’s court decision on Monday.
The office of the Treasury Department of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) removed Tornado Cash from the list of penalties in March, a few months after a court appeal that ruled that the agency was “overstepped authority specified by Congress” by punishing the intelligent Crypto Mixing Service contracts in 2022.
However, the cash method listed in the Tornado, and its subsequent notices and motions filed in court in March, leaving the bright wiggle room for the agency to return the mixing service to the no-fly list in the future, a federal judge said. Treasury’s lawyers have argued that, as OFAC has revoked sanctions against Tornado Cash before the final judgment of the district court (but after the decisive court’s decisions), the issue was moot.
But, to six plaintiffs in Van loon compared to treasury – All users of Tornado Cash – the issue is not, in fact, moot. In a filing of April 21, their lawyers exploded Ofac’s response to the fifth circuit decision, calling it “a study of chaos” and accusing them of “wav (ing) the flag of mootness” in a final effort to “avoid a bad judgment.
“That’s enough,” the lawyers said for the plaintiff to the judge. “It is time for this court to do what the fifth circuit ordered months ago … The appointment of the defendants must be held unlawful and stored.”
In his tightly played yesterday, US district judge Robert Pitman of the West District of Texas said the case was not MOOT, and cooperated with the plaintiffs, who ruled that the OFAC appointment of Tornado Cash was unlawful and the agency was therefore permanently mandated from the implementation of sanctions against it.
“(No) OFAC does not suggest that they do not punish Tornado Cash again, and they may seek ‘reenact exactly the same (dedication) in the future’,” Pitman wrote. “Instead of recognizing that the command of the fifth circuit requires the removal of Tornado Cash, the defendants said they used their ‘decision’ in the decision to do so based on more general policy and legal consideration.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently pursuing criminal charges against two tornado cash developers, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, charged in 2023 with conspiracy to make money losses, conspiracy to run an unlicensed money transmitter, and conspiracy to violate US sanctions. Semenov remains on OFAC penalty list.
Earlier this month, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent the DOJ staff a memo that informs them of narrow crypto -related priorities. Staff has been ordered to stop cases against crypto exchanges, mixing services or offline wallets “for their end users’ works or accidental violation of regulations.” Blanche ordered any ongoing investigation that does not comply with the new priorities to be lowered, and said that his office would cooperate with the DOJ’s criminal division to decide how to proceed with any ongoing trial without achieving new implementation standards.
The memo has already made waves in the continued crypto trial. Prosecutors in the case against two founders of the Crypto Mixer Samaurai Wallet filed a joint request to defense lawyers on Monday, asking the court a 16-day extension to various deadlines as they decided whether or dropped the charges under Blanche’s memo auspice.
A host of well -known numbers in the crypto industry has also signed to A letter From the Defi Education Fund to the White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks on Monday, US President Donald Trump urged the case to “stop the justice-unable biden-era to make the open-source software development criminal and the storm’s persecution.
