Ethermine Stops Processing Sanctioned Transactions

Ethermine is no longer processing blocks that include Tornado Cash transactions, resulting in protocol-level censorship.

The largest Ethereum mining pool, Ethermine, no longer generates blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions. This is most likely due to OFAC penalties and is an example of protocol-level censorship.

Takens Theorem, a crypto analyst, observed that Ethermine has ceased processing Tornado Cash transactions and posted the chart below. CryptoSlate examined on-chain data and determined that Ethermine did not generate a block containing a Tornado Cash transaction during the interval illustrated below.

We have to travel back about 10 days to discover an Ethermine-generated block with a Tornado Cash transaction. Ethermine mined block 15306892, which was produced on August 9th. The Tornado Cash router performed a 10 ETH transaction in the block.

An examination of the most recent Tornado Cash Router transactions revealed that Hiveon, P2Pool, 2Miners, and others prevailed.

This is the result of the US, via OFAC, sanctioning the use of Tornado Cash, making it illegal for any U.S. entity to interact with the protocol.

Following this sanction, Circle and also DeFi protocols such as Aave, Uniswap, Balancer, and others introduced an API from TRM Labs, which disabled the front end of their dApps, essentially banning addresses sanctioned by OFAC.

While some miners are still processing the transactions at the moment, if others follow Ethermine’s path, Tornado Cash may no longer have miners ready to process the transactions.

Vitalik Buterin was so outraged at the prospect of validators complying with OFAC sanctions following The Merge that he declared that any validators who do so should have their ETH staked burned. He agreed that actions that do not contain Tornado Cash transactions should be deemed “an attack on Ethereum and the burning of their stake through social consensus.”

In response to the news, Martin Koppelmann, Co-Founder of Gnosis, disagreed with a comment suggesting “it does not matter.”

Matt Huang, Co-Founder of Paradigm, recently emphasized the necessity of the blockchain ecosystem remaining “neutral and resisting censorship.”

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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