Tornado Cash Sanctions Vacated by Eleventh Circuit Court

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on July 3 vacated the Northern District of Florida’s 2023 order upholding the Treasury’s sanctions against Tornado Cash. The court instructed the lower court to dismiss the case, effectively ending the Coin Center v. Yellen appeal, which was the only remaining case over the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) August 2022 designation of the Ethereum-based privacy mixer.

The one-page mandate from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals concludes the legal battle surrounding Tornado Cash. The Northern District of Florida is now required 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 further legal action unlikely.

On Oct. 30, 2023, the district court ruled that Tornado Cash qualified as an “association” whose smart contracts amounted to blocked property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, granting summary judgment to the Treasury. Coin Center’s November 2023 notice of appeal set up a circuit split when, on Nov. 26, 2024, the Fifth Circuit in Van Loon v. Treasury reversed a Texas court and declared that immutable smart-contract code is not property and cannot be sanctioned.

The Treasury chose not to petition the Supreme Court after Van Loon. Instead, on Mar. 21, it stated that newer “targeted tools” would address illicit crypto flows more precisely. This step erased the factual injury alleged by the Coin Center plaintiffs, leading to both sides filing a joint motion asking the Eleventh Circuit to vacate the district ruling and remand with instructions to dismiss for mootness. The panel granted that request and issued its mandate, formally closing appellate docket 23-13698.

The Tornado Cash protocol remains operational on-chain, free from centralized control. Its governance token, TORN, trades on decentralized exchanges that have never delisted it. Delisting and the appeal’s dismissal do 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 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, while OFAC continues to signal that it may craft narrower designations for privacy tools that demonstrably serve sanctioned actors.