In August last year, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer, to the list of sanctioned entities due to its alleged involvement in the laundering of cryptocurrency valued over $7 billion, with a portion of it possibly originating from the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.
Following this, journalist Colin Wu reported that non-fungible token (NFT) platform OpenSea had blocked his account for using the mixer.
When Wu reached out to the platform for comments, he did not receive a response. He observed similar reports from other users on the platform and speculated that the restriction was due to OpenSea’s “proactive and strict control policy”.
In April of 2023 a Dutch court placed Alexey Pertsev, the developer of Tornado Cash, under house arrest, with the US Department of Justice filing charges of money laundering and sanctions violations against the platform’s co-founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov.
Storm was subsequently taken into FBI custody and later released on bail.
