It's interesting to me that the Fifth Circuit only considered "control" at the smart contract level, and does not seem to consider the role of validators in their opinion. A substantial portion of ETH blocks are built with relays that censor transactions with OFAC-sanctioned contracts, and it seems to me there is now an open question validators that use non-censoring relays could be sanctioned directly.
#crypto #cryptocurrency #TornadoCash
(Not saying they SHOULD, just remarking on the fact that it seems to have gone completely unaddressed.)
#crypto #cryptocurrency #TornadoCash
I still need to read it, but maybe the government just didn't bring it up? They seem to treat Ethereum as just a (neutral, immutable) environment that the smart contracts live in.
And when these sanctions were enacted, the PoS system was relatively new.
With this attack having failed, they'll presumably look for a new target, which could be the (few remaining non-compliant) validators.
Wow. I was curious on the state of affairs, so I got this data set form kaggle and checked the status of validator ofac compliance. Turns out the data is from 2022. It is frustratingly hard to figure out how many validators and relays are non ofac compliant in 2024. The only thing we can do is look at ofac compliant blocks on mevwatch.info.
Ethereum feels like it provides "censorship resistance by obfuscation"
