Privacy is a human right.On August 8th, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the smart contracts associated with Tornado Cash on the terms of facilitating money laundering. This influenced widespread acts of censorship on Ethereum to inhibit the usage of the protocol and ultimately labels all active users for seeking individual anonymity on-chain, as criminals. The public nature of accounting on distributed ledgers is a flaw, not a benefit. It's the act of substantiation and non-repudiation that gives this enabling technology its true value.

The sanctimonious ideology that privacy should be only for the selected "faithful" few has huge implications for discrimination enacted through censorship, privacy is an individual right that everyone should be entitled to. The ongoing acts of surveillance authored by "the state" not only put individual sovereignty at risk but individuals' well-being. This is apparent in the recent travel rule legislation regarding digital currencies, as seen in the European Commission's recent Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) amendment. European law is puppeteered by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) through what is called "directives". The FATF, in turn, is an overarching branch of the American government that has legal immunity, and no oversight although having global influence in regulation. These legislations not only create honeypots of individuals' financial data but set out to blacklist privacy-preserving technologies like Tornado, declaring a war on privacy.

These are the same figures that have failed to regulate private equity's additional attacks on individual privacy, by accommodating the solicitation and commoditization of individuals' sensitive data. These people are not set out for your best interest, time and time again they have failed the common people. On the profiteering of individuals' data, Joseph Lubin - the man behind ConsenSyS - holds the power to de-anonymize almost every single Ethereum transaction. Given the notoriety and popularity of the infrastructure that he ultimately controls, as the majority shareholder of Infura and MetaMask. To no surprise, Infura and other RPC service providers like Alchemy were the first entities to censor relays to the Tornado contracts. Let us remind you, that these entities are actively profiling your transactional footprints, for reasons for solicitation and cooperation with authoritative figures to void your economic rights.

It is apparent that the true colors of actors and organizations reveal themselves in a time of crisis, and we encourage everyone who believes in freedoms to boycott and scrutinize the entities that have over-willingly aided the infringement of digital rights. As a group of dedicated contributors to Tornado, old, new, and future. We pledge an allegiance to circumvent these acts of censorship. Privacy is an individual right that is open to everyone. Community resources to archive and accelerate the development and education of the source code have been deployed, alongside a Telegram server to align community. Active research priorities have revealed themselves at the birth of the crisis for the organization going forward. A privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant, and network-agonistic RPC solution will be actively developed to ensure the accessibility of the protocol. Additionally, the legacy infrastructure of the internet is not a suitable place for the freedom of expression under the reign of ICANN. Thus, efforts will be undertaken to re-empower the original premise of the world wide web.

ICANN, being an American corporation, took down the tornado.cash domain due to OFAC sanctions. However, the community website can currently be accessed at https://tornado.money and the documentation can be found at https://tornado.money/docs.html.

tornado.money

Tornado.Cash

An open, permissionless and unstoppable privacy protocol.