One of the most exciting stories this week - Tornado Cash vs. U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Tornado Cash is a non-custodial privacy solution built on Ethereum. It allows sending tokens into Tornado Cash and then withdrawing them using another wallet. It uses cryptography to make transfer non-trackable.
Long story short.
Phase 1:
Tornado Cash allows making anonymous transfers.
It was used by legitimate users but also by criminals.
The Chainanalysis confirmed that every hack linked with North Korea, used Tornado Cash.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury suddenly banned Tornado Cash.
The Tornado Cash was put on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. It means it can’t do business with anyone in the
U.S.
Anyone that used Tornado Cash might have a problem. Extraordinary things happened next:
Tornado Cash website was taken down,
Github accounts and repositories connected in any way with Tornado Cash got suspended,
Addresses that received ETH from Tornado Cash were sanctioned,
Infrastructure providers start
blocking requests to Tornado Cash.
It looks like colossal sanctions will kill Tornado Cash, and everyone who uses it will lose.
Vitalik Buterin admitted that he used Tornado Cash to donate to Ukraine. It was crucial to use Tornado in that case - it made the donor impossible to track.
Phase 2:
We could put a comma here, but Tornado’s got its own hero.
Someone started transferring the smallest allowed amount of ETH (0.1 ETH) to well-known wallets. It’s now illegal.
Of course, all web3 celebrities now get money from Tornado Cash. Jimmy Fallon, Brian Armstrong, Randi Zuckerburg, Shaq, Dave Chappelle, Logan Paul, Snoop Dogg, and many more are on the list.
Technically all of them broke the law. Per US laws, the penalty for intentionally breaking OFAC sanctions includes prison time and fines between $90,000 to $308,000 per violation.
How will the U.S. Department of the Treasury react?
This is an
unbelievable story. Is this an act of bravery to bring the spotlight to the sanctions put on Tornado or just an evil trolling master plan aimed at celebs? That’s one of the great stories on the web3 field.
It is interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes scary. I dunno how the story continues. 100% sure, we will let you know.
We wrote about that huge update earlier. If you want to read more, Łukasz Charubin wrote a post on the BFC blog with Facts about The Merge.
Today, we asked BoFos - what do they think about The Merge? What are their thoughts, forecasts, fears and sentiments to ETH?
“After such information we are closer to making the Ethereum network ecofriendly. The upgrade will reduce issuance of new ETH by 60% so it might result in price increase. But as always, nobody knows what’s gonna happen. Time will tell :)”
“Well, from our perspective, it is a busy time, no one wants to be "this client that didn't make it" 🙂 I must admit I didn't attend yesterday's merge. From my perspective it is a busy time of polishing things 💪”
One more exciting Cartoon with its own NFT Collection. It’s powered by Blockchain Creative Labs. Krapopolis is a combination
of Greek mythology and “Rick and Morty”. The premiere is planned for 2023 on Fox.
Trippy Mega Mutant Bored Ape sold for 2300 ETH. It’s a lot of cash. Why is this the most expensive Bored Ape ever? This is the one turned to Mutant using rare M3 serum. There were only eight serum tokens. Currently, only one left. Are we waiting for the next record?
BFC CORNER - BLOCKCHAIN BASICS
We want to share with you an interesting event which is organised by one of the Bored Founders - Kacper Różyński.
The Innovations Chains #4, an online event is happening soon (August 17)!
Registration
is MANDATORY - only people that registered will get a recording from that meeting.
Our Keynote Speaker, Rafael Badziag, will provide a lecture titled „Business, the Billionaire Way”. Rafael is a global entrepreneur who: is the author of #1 Amazon best-seller “The Billion Dollar Secret"; met 21 billionaires around the world; has given some of the most popular TED talks in history that have been watched over 4 million times;
1. Klink Finance - operating at the crossroads of gamified consumer finance and blockchain technology. Klink’s mission is to build gamified products that improve existing financial behaviors whilst also giving their users regular access to high-yield crypto returns in a safe, meaningful, and exciting way.
2. blockrating.io - takes the FOMO out of NFTs & Crypto. Their mission is to offer users an unprecedented level of accuracy in
terms of pricing blockchain assets.
3. Straight Fire - the world's first NFT Social dApp for creating and sharing NFT Stories on your socials. They give your NFTs a stage to shine on, so you can promote them, make them stand out from the crowd and find new buyers.
4. Gueno - a behavior-based fraud and compliance platform which analyzes users’ identity, device, and behavior signals to score risk transactions in real-time (in LatAm market).
5. Eczodex - launching the first asset-backed token that accepts real-world assets and crypto as collateral. The token establishes the foundation of the first seamless integration between the worlds of traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi), enabling investors to unlock $trillions of additional capital, utilizing their assets as collateral.
