OKX CEO Threatens to Ban Customers Interacting with Tornado Cash and Garantex
In a bold move, OKX founder and CEO, Star Xu, issued a warning to cryptocurrency exchange users on Thursday night. Xu stated that any customer found interacting with the mixer Tornado Cash and the exchange Garantex will be banned from the platform.
According to Xu, the compliance risk controls will be activated if the OKX team detects deposits from or to Garantex and Tornado Cash, which he describes as “sanctioned entities.” Withdrawals to these platforms are also prohibited.
Xu emphasized that “sanctioned individuals cannot open an account on OKX.” He reassured users that the majority do not need to worry as “sanctions are far from ordinary people.”
Garantex, a crypto exchange based in Estonia, has also been sanctioned by US authorities.
For years, Tornado Cash has been a headache for regulatory entities in various governments. In 2022, the service was banned in the US on charges of aiding hackers, including those from North Korea, in money laundering.
At that time, developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands on similar suspicions. Like other mixers, Tornado Cash conceals where the money is being sent.
Privacy advocates, such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, argue that these services are important for ordinary people. However, there is a significant increase in regulatory scrutiny regarding the use of mixers by criminal groups seeking to conceal illicit funds, such as the North Korean state-sponsored hacker organization, Lazarus Group.
In May of this year, Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for laundering $1.2 billion in illicit assets through Tornado Cash, a outcome described by Buterin as “regrettable.”
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The post OKX CEO Threatens to Ban Customers Interacting with Tornado Cash first appeared on Portal do Bitcoin.
