Tornado Cash is a crypto mixer that recently came under sanction from the United States government. The reasoning given for this was the fact that it was a protocol used by criminals to hide the origins of their funds. Most notably used by South Korean hackers who have stolen millions of dollars in hacks over the last few years.
It was recently made public that the Dutch authorities had apprehended a man who was believed to be one of the developers of Tornado Cash. As the case carries on, some have spoken out in defense of the developers, and one of those is Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson.
Tornado Cash Founders Just Wrote Code
There have been mixed feelings regarding the sanction of Tornado Cash. While some have praised the move, others have seen it as a clear indication that the government was coming for all of the crypto markets. Mostly, investors in the space have been wary of what this might mean for decentralized finance protocols going forward.
However, Charles Hoskinson has taken another route towards approaching this and has instead laid out support for the developers. According to the Cardano founder, developers can write code, and with open source code, they cannot always control what people do with the code once it’s written.
He argued that all the Tornado Cash developers did was actually write the code for the mixer, and others went and used it for nefarious activities. He compared it to someone writing a book on “how you make cyanide” or “how you build a bomb.” He went on to say that these were not instructions for anyone to go do it, and the authors can’t control how people use that information, saying, “For the most part, that’s just words. You’re not telling people to go do this.”
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The Cardano founder seemed to really take offense at the developers of the protocol being subject to such treatment. “The protocol in developer understanding that we have as developers is that when we write code, it’s an expression,” he added. “As long as we don’t get involved in the running and use of that code for purposes, we’re just writing it; it’s like writing a book.”
Hoskinson closed his argument by saying, “They just wrote the code that could technically be used this way.”
Tornado Cash has not been the only mixer targeted by the United States government. Another mixer called Blender had also been sanctioned by the authorities, making it illegal for US residents to interact with it. This is due to the fact that the Ronin hackers had allegedly laundered the $600 million they stopped back in March through the mixer.
The crypto market is still reeling from the sanctions and is yet to unravel what this will really mean for the DeFi space going forward. However, the effects are already being felt as protocols such as Aave have already begun banning wallets associated with the crypto mixers from its platform.
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