PANews reported on April 30 that according to CoinDesk, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas made a final ruling, determining that the sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Tornado Cash were illegal, and permanently prohibited it from imposing sanctions on the mixer. This marks the end of the two-year legal dispute with the privacy agreement party winning the case.
Court documents show that although OFAC took the initiative to remove Tornado Cash from the sanctions list in March 2024, Judge Robert Pitman pointed out its intention to retain the right to re-impose sanctions in the future, and emphasized that "the ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals must be implemented." The six plaintiffs' lawyers in this case accused OFAC of trying to evade judicial review through technical operations.
It is worth noting that Tornado Cash’s two developers, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, are still facing criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice, and the latter is still on the OFAC sanctions list. The ruling only targets the protocol itself and does not involve legal proceedings against the developers.
