Coinbase Funds Lawsuit Against US Treasury Department's Tornado Cash Sanction

Coinbase announced that it's supporting and funding a lawsuit against US Treasury Department, which was filed by six people, including two Coinbase employees. The lawsuit challenges the sanctions on Tornado Cash smart contracts and asks the Court to remove them from the US sanctions list. Last month, Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash and added its smart contracts to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List), because it was being used by criminals, including North Korean hackers. The plaintiffs and Coinbase think the fact that Treasury sanctioned open source technology, rather than sanctioning the criminals who used it or the property of those criminals, not only harms innocent users who now have their funds trapped, but also exceeds Treasury's authority given by Congress. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, describes Treasury's sanction as using "a hammer instead of a scalpel" in his article. He wrote, "while we (Coinbase) share Treasury's commitment to fighting crime, we believe this action harms innocent people and threatens the future of decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 specifically." The six plaintiffs all wrote on Twitter that, "code is speech and free speech is a constitutional right worth protecting." It's reported that one of the plaintiffs used Tornado Cash to anonymize donations to Ukraine to avoid his personal address being attacked by Russian hackers, but now he has funds trapped in Tornado Cash.