US Court vacates Tornado Cash sanctions ruling, orders Florida case dismissal

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 and instructed the lower court to dismiss the case. 

The one-page mandate ends the Coin Center v. Yellen appeal, the only remaining case over OFAC’s August 2022 designation of the Ethereum-based privacy mixer. 

The Northern District of Florida must 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; doing so would require a fresh appeal from a new judgment, which the delisting makes improbable.

Mandate ends Coin Center appeal

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. 

Treasury chose not to petition the Supreme Court after Van Loon. Instead, on Mar. 21, it delisted every Tornado Cash address, stating that newer “targeted tools” would address illicit crypto flows more precisely. 

The 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. 

Limited practical change for the mixer

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.

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