Matthew Green ( Matthew Green ), Professor of Jones Hopkins, with the support of the Electronic Frontier Fundation (EFF ), made the initiative return public access to the project code Tornado Cash , whose repositories were deleted in early August GitHub after hits Service in sanctions lists U.S. Foreign Assets Office ( >).
The Tornado Cash project developed a technology for creating decentralized services of anonymous cryptocurrency transactions that significantly complicate tracking the translation chains and interfering with the definition of the sender’s connection and the recipient of the translation in networks with publicly accessible transactions. The technology is based on the division of the translation into many small parts, multi -stage mixing of these parts with parts of the translations of other participants and transferring the necessary amount in the form of a series of small translations from different random addresses from the general pool of the service.
The largest anonymizer based on Tornado Cash was deployed on the basis of the Ethereum network and, before its closure, processed more than 151 thousand translations from 12 thousand users totaling 7.6 billion dollars. The service was recognized as a threat to US national security and was on a sanctions list prohibiting financial transactions for citizens and companies from the United States. The main reason for the blocking was the use of Tornado Cash to launder funds earned by criminal path, including 455 million dollars stolen by Lazarus.
through this service.
After adding Tornado Cash and the associated cryptocurrency wallets to the sanctions lists, GitHub blocked all the accounting records of the project developers and deleted its repository. The Tornado Cash, which were not used in working implementations, fell under the blow, including experimental systems. It is not yet clear whether the restriction of access to the code was among the sanctions goals or the removal was made without direct pressure at the initiative of GitHub to minimize the risks.