On July 3, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed to end an appeal that crypto advocacy group Coin Center made to OFAC regarding the Ethereum-based mixing service Tornado Cash.
This decision by the court occurred approximately two and a half months after the U.S. Treasury Department removed Tornado Cash from its OFAC Sanctions list after having kept it on the list for over three years.
The dismissal of this case officially ends Coin Center’s challenging OFAC’s decision to include Tornado Cash on its sanctions list.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, executive director at Coin Center commented on X earlier today that the government did not want to continue to defend an interpretation of sanctions laws that seemed too broad.
This appeal being dropped comes in the wake of a memo from the U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in which he stated that the U.S. Department of Justice will no longer target crypto technology like mixers.
Tornado Cash Developers Still On Trial
Despite the fact that this appeal has been dropped and Tornado Cash is no longer on the OFAC sanctions list, the creators of the technology are still on facing criminal charges.
Tornado Cash co-founder and developer Roman Storm is scheduled to appear in federal court in the Southern District of New York on Monday, July 14, 2025.
Storm is currently facing money laundering and sanctions violations charges, though, he has affirmed that he didn’t profit from illicit transactions that were made through the Tornado Cash service.
In September of this year, Storm’s lawyers submitted a motion to dismiss the charges, stating that Tornado Cash did not meet the definition of a money transmitter under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) because the technology does not take control of user funds (i.e., private keys). The court denied the motion, though, stating that the BSA’s scope does not require that the technology take control of user funds.
Alexey Pertsev, another Tornado Cash co-founder, was found guilty of money laundering in The Netherlands in May 2024 and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Roman Semenov, the third Tornado Cash co-founder, has been at large and wanted by the FBI since August 2023. The U.S. Department of Justice plans to bring Semenov up on the same charges as Storm.
