- Crypto advocacy group Coin Center has lost its legal battle against the US Treasury over the sanctioning of Tornado Cash
- Both sides filed for summary motions and the judge ruled in favor of the Treasury
- Judge T. Kent Wethrell said that the Treasury’s actions didn’t violate First Amendment rights
Crypto advocacy group Coin Center has lost its legal battle against the U.S. Treasury’s sanctioning of crypto mixing service Tornado Cash. The group filed the lawsuit in October last year claiming that the Treasury’s actions infringed on American citizens’ First Amendment rights, and the Treasury’s first act was to file a motion for summary judgment in their favor, something Coin Center counter-sued with. Judge T. Kent Wethrell, II ruled in favor of the Treasury yesterday, finding that the designation of Tornado Cash as a sanctioned entity “did not implicate Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.”
Coin Center Said Sanctioning Violated Free Speech
The website and Github codebase for Tornado Cash were both added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals list last August, meaning that any US persons and entities were prohibited from interacting with the protocol or any of the Ethereum wallet addresses tied to it.
Coin Center’s Executive Director Jerry Brito and Research Director Peter van Valkenburgh challenged this decision, arguing that Tornado Cash, being open-source and code-controlled by the public, shouldn’t be subject to sanctions.
Coin Center asserted in its lawsuit that Tornado Cash protects Americans’ transaction privacy, aligning with constitutional and legal norms, hoping that the judge would nullify the criminalization and OFAC’s sanctions on Tornado Cash.
Judge Says First Amendment Rights Not Impacted
A year later, however, Coin Center has tasted defeat, with Judge Wethrell ruling that no First Amendment rights were breached by OFAC’s actions, opining that Coin Center tried to defend its claim using a “freedom of association claim, not a free speech claim,” when their case was based on free speech.
He also ruled that Coin Center did not “cite any authority supporting the existence of a First Amendment right to use a particular service or type of currency to make donations for charitable or other purposes,” and noted that there are plenty of other mixing tools out there for Americans to use if they wished to practice their rights to transactional privacy.
Coin Center spokesperson Neeraj Agrawal said that the verdict was “disappointing” and that Coin Center plans to appeal.
