OKX to Suspend Accounts Engaging with Tornado Cash
OKX COO, Star Xu warned account holders that using Tornado Cash (TORN) will result in a suspension.
The CEO of OKX has announced in a statement published on X that users who have been previously sanctioned will be prohibited from opening new accounts on the platform.
Additionally, the crypto exchange will terminate the accounts of users who deposit funds from sanctioned entities, including Garantex and Tornado Cash, as per the statement.
The move comes after an account holder on OKX, Satoshi Friends, told his followers on X that the exchange had blocked him from using the platform because he used Tornado Cash.
Tornado Cash, which was established in 2019 by Roman Semenov, Alexey Pertsev, and Roman Storm, a group of Russian nationals residing in Europe, is a company that specializes in the anonymizing cryptography.
This technology employs software to obscure the origins of cryptocurrencies deposited through the service, thereby redistributing deposits into a series of small transactions that are challenging to track.
For transactions involving Tornado Cash, Pertsev was sentenced to five years in prison in May 2024 for violating anti-money laundering laws.
Tornado Cash, as well as Monero and Zcash, are classified as privacy coins and have all encountered regulatory scrutiny.
The Tornado Cash, the mixer that is the most frequently used and the largest, has been accused of laundering stolen funds for international criminal organizations and of having connections to the Lazarus Group, an entity that the US government has implicated in the financing of North Korea's nuclear program.
