A U.S. federal appeals court has officially ended a legal battle between the Treasury Department and crypto advocacy group Coin Center over sanctions placed on Tornado Cash. This was after last week when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit granted a joint request to close the case, marking the final step in a dispute that began nearly two years ago.
The lawsuit is about the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioning Tornado Cash in August 2022. The platform was blacklisted for allegedly being used to hide illegal funds. These sanctions banned U.S. individuals and businesses from using the platform.
But the Coin Center challenged this. It argued that the government had gone too far in its interpretation of sanctions law. The legal process stretched over months until OFAC rolled back the sanctions in March. In the joint motion filed last week, both parties agreed that the case should be dropped. The government said the rollback made the case irrelevant.
“The government’s view is that OFAC’s rescission of the designation moots this appeal,” the court filing stated. Coin Center agreed but added that the case would only be completely moot after a related court ruling in Texas becomes final.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, executive director of Coin Center, announced the conclusion on Monday in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “This is the official end to our court battle over the statutory authority behind the TC sanctions. The government was not interested in moving forward and defending their dangerously overbroad interpretation of sanctions laws,” he wrote.
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