The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued sanctions against Tornado Cash this month, marking its first action against a decentralized finance (DeFi) mixer in what may prove to be a watershed moment for DeFi regulation. A lack of response and regulatory preparation from the industry is perhaps unsurprising of a mindset honed outside the rule of law. Yet, the potential of DeFi is threatened if its leaders do not face the reality that regulation in this space will only increase. Taking steps to work with regulators is now the only way forward. On Aug. 8, OFAC targeted …

Clamping down on crypto applications that “mess with the primal forces of regulation” is necessary, says Shark Tank host and millionaire venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, who argued that Tornado Cash and similar services are preventing real institutional capital from coming into the space. In a discussion on Crypto Banter on Saturday, O’Leary, also known as Mr. Wonderful, suggested that applications like Ethereum-based crypto mixer Tornado Cash are a part of a “crypto cowboy” culture that shouldn’t have a place in the industry. Instead, O’Leary is of the view that crypto needs a “rules-based environment” in order to attract real institutional …

On Tuesday, one day after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash for its alleged role in cryptocurrency money laundering operations, intervals of 0.1 Ether (ETH) transactions began materializing from the smart contract to prominent figures such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and American television host Jimmy Fallon. It is not possible to trace the source of the transactions per Tornado Cash design, and as a result, either one individual or multiple individuals or entities could be involved in the operation. Notable individuals/companies who just received funds from a government-sanctioned entity: - Jimmy Fallon - Shaquille O'Neal - PUMA …

According to Twitter user @0xdev0, on Monday, Web 3.0 development platform Alchemy and Infura.io blocked remote procedure call (RPC) requests to cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, preventing users from accessing the applications. The day prior, the U.S. Treasury placed 44 smart contract addresses linked to Tornado Cash in the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list. U.S. persons and entities are prohibited with blockchain or business interactions with Tornado Cash under such sanctions, with the possibility of criminal liabilities for violations. The move came after the U.S. Treasury alleged individuals and groups had used the privacy protocol to launder more …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested there may be a “low-tech approach” to incorporating privacy features ito nonfungible token, or NFT, transactions. In a Monday post on the Ethereum research channel, Buterin implied Merkle trees and Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, or ZK-SNARKs, were a more complicated method for stealth addresses for ERC-721 tokens, while proposing his own solution. The Ethereum co-founder suggested instead that smart contract wallets could include a method that would allow the sender to essentially mask their address to third parties. “You would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except …

As on-chain activities slow down during the crypto winter, usage of cryptocurrency mixers has doubled in 2022, with addresses classified as “illicit” being the top contributor. Cryptocurrency mixers, also called “tumblers,” provide anonymity to transactions, making the sender or receiver of the transaction completely unidentified. While this has a valid use case for everyday users, hackers have used it to hide from authorities. In a report by analytics firm Chainalysis, data shows that the 30-day moving average of the total daily value received by crypto mixers reached a new all-time high of $51.8 million in April 2022. The amount is …

The excitement surrounding Web3 is palpable — and undeniable. Projects are flooding into the space to build cutting-edge versions of the sites and apps served up by centralized Web2 rivals, covering every sector imaginable. But at this point, it's worth taking a step back and reflecting on the challenges that the Web3 world still needs to tackle. This technology isn't inherently private — and the transactions bouncing around on blockchains are mostly transparent. Privacy coins, and the anonymizing blockchains they're normally based on, are normally viewed with suspicion by critics. They point to how cryptocurrencies like Monero are increasingly being …

Crypto and Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines seem to be an unhappy marriage — pseudonymity in the digital currencies’ DNA doesn’t match the old-school centralized protocols of traditional finance, but cohabitation is inevitable for the maturing industry. The tension never really goes away, but even before recent months’ market failures for crypto, the regulators have been clearly hogging the blanket, nudging the established platforms toward more strict authentication procedures and cutting the privacy-hardline players off the market. Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson expressed a popular opinion from the industry side in the United States Congress when he told legislators that no …

Cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash has fully open-sourced its user interface (UI) code — a move its developers say fulfills their mandate of complete decentralization and transparency. Tornado Cash Classic UI became fully open-sourced on Thursday, the protocol’s anonymous developers announced in a Medium blog post. Although the protocol’s UI has been decentralized since 2020, its open sourcing means anyone can analyze Tornado Cash’s UI pools and make pull requests to improve the project. In the software development world, a pull request is when a developer is ready to merge new code changes with the project's main repository. Technically, Tornado Cash’s …

Aside from the buzzing neologism of Web3, there is a bit less catchy but hardly less important concept of Industry 4.0, which includes the new and revolutionary drivers of the next generation’s industrial landscape. And, especially when it comes to the energy sector, blockchain lies at the heart of these technologies. The authors of a recently published EUBlockchain Observatory report “Blockchain Applications in the Energy Sector” are convinced that distributed ledger technology (DLT) could become a key enabler technology and has a very high potential to influence or even disrupt the energy sector. This comes as a no surprise, given …

As the conversation around privacy intensified with the recent Litecoin (LTC) upgrade called Mimblewimble and regulators’ reaction to the feature, Adrian Brink, the founder of blockchain protocol Anoma, weighed in on the topic and shared his perspectives with Cointelegraph. According to Brink, privacy is an essential tool for democracy because it prevents huge corporations from targeting people and segregating them into different bubbles. The Anoma founder told Cointelegraph that: “The fact that you have surveillance capitalism allows micro-targeting to such an extent that it can put people into their own filter bubbles, which is what erodes democracy very quickly.” Brink …

Crypto exchange Binance has courted controversy almost since its 2017 beginnings, and five years later, the dustups continue. On June 6, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission was reported to be investigating whether Binance Holdings broke United States securities rules in launching its digital tokens. Meanwhile, on the same day, Reuters published a scathing 4,700-word “special report” titled “How crypto giant Binance became a hub for hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers.” Binance almost immediately retorted to Reuters with a blog post of its own, warning about “authors and pundits who cherry pick data, rely on conveniently unverifiable ‘leaks’ from …