The United States government’s sanctioning of the open-source code that makes up the Tornado Cash privacy protocol may be shocking, but it’s not surprising. America has been tightening its grip over the global financial system for decades ostensibly to cut down on bad behavior but also to project power abroad.
Economic sanctions, like the ones enforced by the aptly named Office of Foreign Assets Control, are a powerful weapon. The agency’s website states that it “enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals.” It does this to fight drug dealers, terrorists, and “other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.”
Omid Malekan is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and the author of Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms.
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