On 8 August 2022 the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added Tornado Cash to the Specially Designated Nationals list — the mixer as an entity, plus dozens of Ethereum addresses tied to it. OFAC said the service had been used to launder more than $7 billion in virtual currency since 2019, including more than $455 million it attributed to the Lazarus Group after large thefts, and proceeds from later bridge heists. US persons generally may not deal in blocked property. Circle froze USDC at some of the listed addresses the same day. Front-end sites and GitHub copies went dark or got pulled. The contracts on Ethereum were still sitting where they had been deployed.
This is not the 2024 Samourai Wallet arrests, which are a criminal case about a Bitcoin mixing product sold as a service. Different tool, different theory, different year. Later court fights over whether immutable contracts are “property” OFAC may block — and a 2025 delisting — are later instruments. This page is the designation.
What happened
A mixer takes deposits and returns coins that are harder to link on a public ledger. OFAC’s theory is that this particular service had become a laundromat for thieves, including a sanctioned state actor, and that US sanctions law can reach it by listing the entity and the addresses. Developers, users, and exchanges now have a compliance fact: those addresses are on a list. Whether writing or using open-source mixing code is the same as dealing with a blocked person is what lawyers will argue. A magazine is not OFAC guidance.
Why it matters
If you are a US person, or you use a US-touching venue, interacting with listed addresses is how ordinary businesses get destroyed. If you used Tornado for privacy and you are not in that bucket, you still live in a world where many rails will treat those coins as radioactive. Privacy on a transparent ledger was always a product with a legal weather system. See how to read a crypto headline without getting played. We will not use this page to cheer a blacklist or to sell a mixer.
What happens next
Wallet warnings, exchange freezes, and lawsuits. Nothing here is legal advice, and it is not an instruction to mix, unmix, buy, or sell ether.
