Tornado Cash: When Governments Sanction Code (facilitated by Reuben Youngblom, Stanford Law School’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics)

In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Treasury Department recently sanctioned Tornado Cash, a widely used decentralized mixer protocol that enables private transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Regulators highlight justifiable concerns relating to financial crimes and national security. Critics worry that cracking down on software – instead of targeted sanctions on individuals and organizations – sets a dangerous precedent by adversely impacting a significant share of legitimate transactions, threatening privacy of financial transactions, and possibly violating the right to free speech. This session will consider where law enforcement is headed, and discuss the implications of the sanctions for other protocols that purport to solve for transactional privacy, the broader crypto ecosystem, and a wide array of evolving technologies.