Edward Snowden Talks Tornado Cash Sanctions, Ethereum Merge, DAOs and NFTs at Camp Decrypt 2022

Edward Snowden Talks Tornado Cash Sanctions, Ethereum Merge, DAOs and NFTs at Camp Decrypt 2022
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Three months after the U.S. government blacklisted the Ethereum mixing tool Tornado Cash, Edward Snowden called it a "do or die moment" that people in the crypto community "largely aren't taking seriously enough."

Snowden, who exposed an unlawful mass surveillance program by the NSA nearly 10 years ago and fled the United States, also helped launch the privacy coin Zcash in 2016, a leaked video earlier this year revealed. Over the past few years, he has been a vocal crypto advocate, though he has said that Bitcoin is still not private enough.

Tornado Cash, launched in 2019, is a blockchain protocol that helps users pool and "mix" coins so as to mask the origin and destination of their transactions. In August, OFAC (the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department), added the Tornado Cash website and a long list of Ethereum wallet addresses to its Specially Designated Nationals list, banning American citizens from using the tool. The action meant that centralized crypto projects had to choose whether to comply with OFAC by banning wallet address that had interacted with Tornado Cash, or be in non-compliance.