U.S. Treasury Ends Legal Battle Over Ethereum Mixer Tornado Cash

In Brief:

The Treasury Department has dropped its sanctions case against Tornado Cash.

The decision follows OFAC’s earlier move to lift restrictions on the mixer in March.

The long-running legal battle between the U.S. Treasury Department and crypto advocacy group Coin Center over Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash has officially ended. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit granted a motion to vacate the judgment and dismiss the case, effectively closing the chapter on a contentious regulatory issue in crypto.

The move comes after the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—a branch of the Treasury—removed economic sanctions on Tornado Cash in March 2025. With the sanctions no longer in place, both sides agreed the appeal had become “moot.”

Coin Center’s Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh shared on social media that the government chose not to defend its previous legal stance in court. “The government was not interested in moving forward and defending their dangerously overbroad interpretation of sanctions laws,” he wrote.

Tornado Cash, a privacy-focused coin mixer on Ethereum, was blacklisted in 2022 by OFAC, sparking backlash from developers and privacy advocates. Critics argued that sanctioning open-source code violated free speech and set a dangerous precedent for software regulation.

Now that the case has been dismissed, privacy advocates see it as a small but meaningful win in the ongoing battle between crypto innovation and regulatory overreach.

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