Eleventh Circuit Dismisses Coin Center Appeal Over Tornado Cash Sanctions

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has dismissed an appeal filed by the crypto advocacy organization Coin Center against the US Treasury, effectively ending a legal battle over the sanctions imposed on the Ethereum-based privacy mixer, Tornado Cash. The court granted a joint motion to vacate a lower court ruling, which had upheld the Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash. This decision marks the conclusion of the Coin Center v. Yellen appeal, the sole remaining case related to the Office of Foreign Assets Control's (OFAC) August 2022 designation of Tornado Cash.

The legal saga began in October 2023 when the Northern District of Florida ruled that Tornado Cash qualified as an "association" whose smart contracts amounted to blocked property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This ruling granted summary judgment to the Treasury. Coin Center subsequently filed a notice of appeal in November 2023, setting the stage for a potential circuit split. In November 2024, the Fifth Circuit in Van Loon v. Treasury reversed a Texas court's decision, declaring that immutable smart-contract code is not property and cannot be sanctioned. The Treasury chose not to petition the Supreme Court after this ruling, instead opting to develop newer "targeted tools" to address illicit crypto flows more precisely. This policy shift erased the factual injury alleged by the Coin Center plaintiffs, leading both sides to file a joint motion asking the Eleventh Circuit to vacate the district ruling and remand with instructions to dismiss for mootness.

The Eleventh Circuit granted this request, formally closing the appellate docket 23-13698. The mandate issued by the court ends the Coin Center appeal and instructs the Northern District of Florida to enter a short dismissal on remand to implement the appellate mandate. No party has announced an intention to seek Supreme Court review of the vacatur order, making a fresh appeal from a new judgment improbable.

Despite the lifting of sanctions and the conclusion of the litigation, the Tornado Cash protocol remains operational on-chain, free from centralized control. Its governance token, TORN, continues to trade on decentralized exchanges that have never delisted it. The dismissal of the appeal does not affect the criminal proceedings against Tornado Cash co-founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, who face money laundering charges in the Southern District of New York. Furthermore, it does not resolve whether developers can be held liable for the downstream use of autonomous code. These questions will likely reach courts only through future enforcement actions rather than this concluded civil suit.

With the sanctions lifted and the litigation concluded, Tornado Cash returns to the regulatory grey zone that governed it before August 2022. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) continues to signal that it may craft narrower designations for privacy tools that demonstrably serve sanctioned actors. This development underscores the evolving regulatory landscape for cryptocurrencies and the ongoing debate over the legal status of decentralized financial tools.