Crypto mixer Tornado Cash has returned to the software development platform GitHub after more than a few weeks of being banned on the website.
Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon stimulated GitHub to fully restore Tornado Cash’s repositories after fractional unbanning.
Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon took to Twitter on Thursday to declare that GitHub has partly unbanned the Tornado Cash organization and contributors on their platform. The developer recommended that Tornado Cash’s code repositories are now in read-only mode, which means that GitHub is yet to restore full functionality.
According to GitHub data, the last Tornado Cash repositories updates were made on Aug. 22, or just after Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov noted that his account was on the platform. On Aug. 8, the United States Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) banned U.S. residents from using Tornado Cash and blacklisted 44 USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH) addresses associated with the mixer.
Tornado Cash’s return to GitHub came soon after the OFAC clarified its policies around Tornado Cash on Sept. 13, stating that U.S. residents would not be violating sanctions by copying the mixer’s code or making it available online. The OFAC also announced that U.S. persons would not be banned from visiting the Tornado Cash website if it again becomes available online.
Based on the Ethereum blockchain, Tornado Cash is a tool permitting users to hide their crypto transactions to defend their anonymity by confusing information trails on the blockchain. The Ethereum mixer came under scrutiny from global regulators after the OFAC’s ban, which triggered arrests of Tornado Cash developers for alleged involvement in money laundering through the platform.
The continuing controversy around Tornado Cash has raised a lot of questions in the cryptocurrency and developer community, with many people becoming worried about legal issues connected to writing open-source code. Some major crypto companies also pushed back against the Treasury Department’s actions, with Coinbase exchange deciding to support a lawsuit brought by Tornado Cash users against the OFAC.
As formerly reported, Ethereum co-founder Vitalic Buterin claimed openly that he used Tornado Cash to contribute funds to Ukraine to guard the financial privacy of the recipients.
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