🌪️ Calm Before the Tornado…

Tornado Cash, a decentralised, non-custodial, anonymous cryptocurrency exchange protocol has passed its first governance proposal since the U.S. Treasury Department levied sanctions on it in August. The proposal directs Tornado Cash’s Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain, tornadocash.eth, to a brand-new interface created by the community.

• According to engineer Micah Zoltu, the previous interface was dependent on a hosted version of The Graph, a data protocol which dropped support for Tornado Cash following the initial sanctions.
• On December 13th, the proposal which also addressed other “weak points” in the interface was passed unanimously. One user voted with almost 20,000 TORN tokens including a note which read “free Alex Pertsev he does not control anything the people do” in reference to the programmer currently imprisoned in the Netherlands.
• Michah Zoltu said, “[The vote] means that Tornado really is a community project and not just a faux community project like many.
• The sanctions imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) together with the arrest of Pertsev, invigorated the crypto industry to take action. Crypto exchange powerhouse Coinbase has funded a lawsuit to get sanctions lifted and Coin Center, a non-profit advocacy group has also sued the U.S. Treasury Department.
• With a successful proposal behind it, the protocol is testing blockchain-based protocols’ resiliency in a way that none has before. The newly established Tornado Cash Community Twitter account describes the protocol as “unstoppable” and states that a second proposal will come after the first. The Tornado DAO is making history in the cryptocurrency world despite facing unimaginable adversity.