Vitalik Buterin Claims To Have Donated To Ukraine Via Tornado Cash

A little over a day after the U.S. Treasury Department placed Tornado Cash on the blacklist for aiding in money laundering, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he used it to donate to Ukraine.

In a tweet, Counterfactual cofounder Jeff Coleman argued that such a gift is a “wonderful example of a real demand for financial privacy” that Tornado Cash might support. Buterin’s comments were in reaction to Coleman’s tweet.

“Even if the government where you live is in full support, you might not want [the] Russian government to have full details of your actions,” Coleman said. 

On Monday, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department added Tornado Cash to its list of Specially Designated Nationals, effectively prohibiting all individuals and businesses from utilizing the service.

Tornado Cash has laundered more than US$7 billion in cryptocurrencies

Services called “crypto mixers” let users deposit cryptocurrency into a sizable pool and then withdraw the same amount, less a charge, to numerous wallets to hide the origins of the original tokens.

Crypto mixer proponents contend that not all monies that pass through the services are unlawful, and some, like Coin Center director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh, have even gone so far as to declare the ban to be unconstitutional.

In a keynote at ZCON3, Valkenburgh presented the case that both the political use of otherwise lawful transactions to protect one’s privacy and the banning of software release are unconstitutional since they restrict speech.

People in both Russia and Ukraine started using cryptocurrencies as a store of value after Russia’s invasion since the currencies of both countries experienced a sharp decline.

As the nation’s financial system is severely stressed, activists and volunteer organizations within Ukraine have been using cryptocurrencies to crowdsource donations to help fund a defense against the Russian invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine authorized cryptocurrencies in March after recognizing its potential to aid the country’s humanitarian and defensive endeavors.

Because the Russian government, where Buterin was born, was already aware of his views on Ukraine, he claimed that his goal in using the service was to safeguard the recipients rather than himself.

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