August 9, 2022

🥛 Tornado banned: is this the end of privacy?

GM. This is the Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s like Wendy’s – Always Fresh, Never Frozen.

PSA: Everyone remain calm – yesterday ETH hit $1,800 for the first time in 2 months.

I got so hyped I called my mom like I did back in 3rd grade when I learned something cool at school.

Let's get into the good stuff:

  • Tornado Cash gets banned in the U.S

  • Weekly Crypto Funds Report

  • Bite-sized treats

  • Meme of the day

TORNADO CASH GETS BANNED IN THE U.S

The U.S Treasury dropped a bomb yesterday… they added Tornado Cash to their sanction list.

Tornado is used to anonymize transactions. It's a crypto mixer. And no, that’s not crypto’s version of the Catalina Wine Mixer.

~$440m in crypto assets were frozen and all addresses associated with Tornado were put on the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) list. It's like the “No Fly” list of business – if you’re on it, you can’t do business with anyone in the U.S.

Why was it put on the list? Some people use Tornado to keep their transactions private. But of course, there are bad actors.

In fact, according to Chainanalysis, every single North Korean-linked hack used Tornado to launder funds.

Why this matters: The SDN list has historically been used for people – i.e terrorists, drug lords, people that put pineapple on pizza, etc. JK on that last one…

But this is the first time it’s being used on a tech tool. Now anyone that uses it gets in trouble. Whether you're using it for legit reasons or not.

The news caused a series of events:

  • Github accounts and code repositories associated with Tornado got suspended

  • Circle, a popular stablecoin issuer, blacklisted all the Ethereum addresses that were sanctioned. Over 75,000 USDC was frozen

  • Tornado website was taken down

  • Infrastructure providers like Alchemy and Infra started blocking RPC requests to Tornado so it can't be accessed

We saw what Adam Cochran said on Twitter about it and couldn't agree more:

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WEEKLY CRYPTO FUNDS REPORT

The results for the latest Weekly Crypto Funds Report are in… there was a total inflow of $3m last week.

You might need the Hubble telescope to see it on the graph above but it’s there, I promise! Better to have money coming in than going out, amirite?

Here are some other highlights:

  • Ethereum led the pack of inflows this week. $16m was pumped into ETH last week. That’s 7 straight weeks of ETH inflows – a total of $159m this year

  • Bitcoin-Short funds see record outflows of $7.5m. That’s back-to-back weeks of outflows. Signaling that investors might see the BTC price bottoming

The biggest highlight: That’s 6 straight weeks of total inflows – totaling $529m. Investors are loving that crypto discount double-check.

BITE-SIZED TREATS

White hat hackers have returned $32.6M worth of tokens to Nomad bridge. Still $150m+ left to go.

Finbold Report: There are now 39,000+ Bitcoin ATMs around the world.

Zipmex announces customers will be able to start withdrawing their crypto from the exchange again starting August 11th. Withdrawals have been paused since July 20th.

Galaxy Digital reports a $554m loss in Q2. That’s 5x more than they lost in Q1. Ouch.

Hodlnaut is the latest crypto exchange to pause withdrawals due to “recent market conditions”. Another one bites the dust.

Dave Portnoy alleges he is being sued by SafeMoon for giving them a “bad look”. Portnoy invested $40k, it crashed 99%, and talked about it on air. Now he's getting sued.

MEME OF THE DAY

😂😂

That's a wrap for today ladies & gents. See ya tomorrow!

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VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

A ROADERS REVIEW

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.