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Blockchain data providers Infura and Alchemy are now blocking remote procedure calls to Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer, which was earlier sanctioned by the US Treasury, according to a Twitter user @0xdev0.
Tornado Cash noted that besides Alchemy and Infura, other crypto and tech services also blacklisted assets and services related to the mixer. Circle, a company that issues the USDC stablecoin, froze $75,000 in the stablecoin belonging to Tornado Cash.
Circle Co-Founder, Jeremy Allair, confirmed that Circle alongside cryptocurrency exchange COINBASE restricted the movement of USDC funds in "sanctioned addresses." He added:
"To date, policy efforts have focused primarily on issues of market supervision and stablecoins, alongside a global effort to continue to enhance AML/CTF controls for digital assets operators and intermediaries."
At the time of writing, Infura or Alchemy made no official statement regarding the matter. Tornado Cash developer, Roman Semenov, added in a tweet that Github also banned his account. ETH.LIMO, a service that positions itself as a "decentralized alternative" to Cloudflare also banned Tornado Cash resources.
The moves come just a day after the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash for laundering over $7 billion worth of crypto since 2019.
The US regulator says that the smart contract helped North Korean hackers Lazarus Group launder $455 million of stolen crypto. Moreover, Tornado Cash reportedly helped launder over $96 million from the Harmony bridge heist as well as $7.8 million from the Nomad bridge hack.
