GitHub Restores Tornado Cash’s Code, but Only for View

GitHub recently restored Tornado Cash's code repositories for viewing, but ETH developers want more

The sanctions levied by the US Treasury on the crypto mixing platform Tornado Cash shocked the entire investment community. Tornado Cash was accused of supporting money laundering schemes and scam artists to carry out their operations. Illicit practitioners had basically turned the platform into their favorite tool for laundering cryptocurrency proceeds via NFT scams. Reports claimed that the platform was actually the source of laundering US$130 million worth of cryptocurrencies through NFT marketplaces, besides, after these allegations were made, legal authorities failed to contact Tornado Cash, which was more proof that the platform's executives were actually guilty. Right after the news about the Ethereum coin mixer giant broke out, GitHub, a platform that allows developers to share code, removed the tool's code from its platform just within hours of the OFAC announcement.

The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted Tornado Cash, the platform that enabled users to anonymously send and receive Ethereum. American citizens were banned from interacting with the application, which combines together transactions to obscure the origin of the transactions. It blended potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others to obfuscate the source and destination of crypto assets. But the OFAC is the watchdog that noticed several indiscretions on part of the website. After the news broke out, the US Treasury immediately prohibited US citizens and businesses from the service. But times might change for the platform as now GitHub has restored the code repositories of Tornado Cash for the users to view.

GitHub Restores Tornado Cash's Code for Users to Just View!

GitHub is basically a centralized internet hosting service for software development often used by ETH developers. Within hours of the OFAC announcement, GitHub, along with other platforms, removed Tornado Cash from their sites to comply with the new US regulation. But right now, after the launch of the Ethereum Merge upgrade, ETH developers wish to ramp up their game and wished for the platform to reverse its bans. They believed that computer code is protected speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution and have called for platforms that host the Tornado Cash code to reverse these bans and reinstate the mixer's code on September 13.

But unfortunately, Tornado Cash's return to GitHub does not really mean that the development on the coin mixer will continue as usual. All the pages under the platform's primary profile are tagged as public archives, which is a status that could be lifted eventually in the near future, but currently implies that no future developments are presently allowed. All the data provided by GitHub is in 'read only' mode, demonstrated the outright ban of developements. Meanwhile, a separate unofficial archive of Tornado Cash's code has been on GitHub since August, which was created by a Johns Hopkins professor named Matthew Green.

Bottom Line

Even after GitHub listed the platform's code in its platform, the future of the ETH crypto mixing platform is still quite uncertain. Sanctions on Tornado Cash prohibits its primary use in place, but users can still access the service due to its decentralized nature. Whether or not GitHub will restore the account's former status is still uncertain and debatable, the executives of the platform definitely need to be extremely careful before unleashing the code and enable malpractitioners to use it for illegal purposes.