In spite of recent court losses, the crypto industry and other interested parties will not give up on their battle against Tornado Cash.
Two plaintiffs have taken their fight against the US Treasury Department before federal appeals courts. Joseph Van Loon and five self-identified “criminals” have filed a lawsuit against the US Treasury Department. “Ethereum blockchain users” The US Treasury Department and its Secretary Janet Yellen as well as the Office of Foreign Asset Control Director Andrea Gacki were sued in September 2022.
Tornado Cash was sanctioned in August 2022 on the grounds that it facilitated money laundering. In August 2022, Tornado Cash came under sanctions on the grounds that the service was accused of facilitating the laundering of millions of dollars.
The plaintiffs say that mixing services should not appear on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN). Treasury’s “unprecedented, overbroad action exceeds Defendants’ statutory authority, infringes on Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, and threatens the ability of law-abiding Americans to engage freely and privately in financial transactions,” Plaintiffs wrote their complaint in September.
An August ruling by a Texas federal court sided in favor of the federal government, as it rejected OFAC’s argument that the agency was not within its legal jurisdiction.
“Plaintiffs urge the Court to reject broad definition, claiming that OFAC is not entitled to deference when defining unambiguous statutory terms,” In his opinion, Judge Robert Pitman has written a letter. “But ‘interest in property’ is hardly an unambiguous term.”
Loon, his co-plaintiffs and Coinbase filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit, Tuesday. They claimed that Pitman’s ruling did not take into account the fact that Tornado Cash is a computer program, not money. “foreign national or person,” This puts it out of the jurisdiction OFAC.
“Whether the Department’s inclusion of immutable smart contracts on the SDN List is contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority because the purported Tornado Cash entity does not have an ‘interest’ in the immutable smart contracts under [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act] and the North Korea Act,” Loon’s Appeal States
Coin Center and Bankless founder David Hoffman, along with others, filed a suit against these federal parties on October 20, 2022.
Coin Center, along with its co-plaintiffs, filed an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Florida last week, similar to the Loon case.
Coin Center expressed similar concerns about the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and how the government treated Tornado Cash as an alien or foreign national.
“Congress gave [the] Treasury the power to prohibit transactions involving certain “You can also find out more about the property by clicking here.” in which a foreign “National” or sanctioned ‘person’ has an interest,” Paul Grewal wrote on X, Tuesday. Treasury’s actions here stretch that authority and these words to the limit.
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