1 hr 17 min

The Chopping Block: Did OFAC Overstep by Sanctioning Tornado Cash‪?‬ Unchained

    • Business News

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Laura Shin, host of Unchained and author of The Cryptopians, also joined the conversation. 
 
Show topics:

What Tornado Cash is and why it got sanctioned by the OFAC

The difference between Tornado Cash and blender.io 

Whether privacy is dead as a category and whether regulators are going after it

How these sanctions have a negative impact on the funding of privacy projects

How people within the industry can have different points of view, even when they understand the technology

Whether the ban of Tornado Cash only means that malicious groups will just go and use other protocols

Why regulation by enforcement sucks

The asymmetry between the government’s sanction and the effort needed to push it back.

What changes after the Merge for ETH in terms of centralization

Whether some MEV solutions make Ethereum more centralized

Why MEV is intrinsic to blockchains and whether it is impossible to get rid of it

Why Proposer-Builder Separation is helpful for the network

Whether MEV is illegal and the plausibility of major exchanges not extracting MEV

Why Facebook has an MEV extraction business model, according to Tarun

How some NFT exchanges are not enforcing royalties

What Sudoswap is and how it works

How the royalties were there to bootstrap the supply side of NFTs

Why Tarun thinks music NFTs will never happen

The economic reasoning around royalties

The differences between NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Magic Eden

Whether NFTs have a real-world use

How Dragonfly’s acquisition of Metastable brought Laura some old memories


Hosts

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital

https://twitter.com/hosseeb

Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital

https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt

Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures


https://twitter.com/tarunchitra 

 
Laura
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurashin


Episode Links
 
Tornado Cash
Treasury Press release: 
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%93%20Today%2C%20the%20U.S.%20Department,since%20its%20creation%20in%202019
Developer arrested: https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado-cash/
Coin Center’s article authored by Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh: https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/
Second Coin Center’s article authored by Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh: https://www.coincenter.org/analysis-what-is-and-what-is-not-a-sanctionable-entity-in-the-tornado-cash-case/
Coin Center may challenge the US Treasury's decision to sanction Tornado Cash: https://decrypt.co/107475/coin-center-tornado-cash-ban-court
Circle freezes USDC in sanctioned wallets: https://www.theblock.co/post/162172/circle-freezes-usdc-funds-in-tornado-cashs-us-treasury-sanctioned-wallets 
Crypto exchange dYdX blocked accounts that received funds from Tornado Cash: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/11/crypto-exchange-dydx-blocked-accounts-that-received-even-small-amounts-from-tornado-cash/
The possibility of forking Tornado Cash: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/08/10/cloning-tornado-cash-would-be-easy-but-risky/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Laura Shin, host of Unchained and author of The Cryptopians, also joined the conversation. 
 
Show topics:

What Tornado Cash is and why it got sanctioned by the OFAC

The difference between Tornado Cash and blender.io 

Whether privacy is dead as a category and whether regulators are going after it

How these sanctions have a negative impact on the funding of privacy projects

How people within the industry can have different points of view, even when they understand the technology

Whether the ban of Tornado Cash only means that malicious groups will just go and use other protocols

Why regulation by enforcement sucks

The asymmetry between the government’s sanction and the effort needed to push it back.

What changes after the Merge for ETH in terms of centralization

Whether some MEV solutions make Ethereum more centralized

Why MEV is intrinsic to blockchains and whether it is impossible to get rid of it

Why Proposer-Builder Separation is helpful for the network

Whether MEV is illegal and the plausibility of major exchanges not extracting MEV

Why Facebook has an MEV extraction business model, according to Tarun

How some NFT exchanges are not enforcing royalties

What Sudoswap is and how it works

How the royalties were there to bootstrap the supply side of NFTs

Why Tarun thinks music NFTs will never happen

The economic reasoning around royalties

The differences between NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Magic Eden

Whether NFTs have a real-world use

How Dragonfly’s acquisition of Metastable brought Laura some old memories


Hosts

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital

https://twitter.com/hosseeb

Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital

https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt

Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures


https://twitter.com/tarunchitra 

 
Laura
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurashin


Episode Links
 
Tornado Cash
Treasury Press release: 
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%93%20Today%2C%20the%20U.S.%20Department,since%20its%20creation%20in%202019
Developer arrested: https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado-cash/
Coin Center’s article authored by Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh: https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/
Second Coin Center’s article authored by Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh: https://www.coincenter.org/analysis-what-is-and-what-is-not-a-sanctionable-entity-in-the-tornado-cash-case/
Coin Center may challenge the US Treasury's decision to sanction Tornado Cash: https://decrypt.co/107475/coin-center-tornado-cash-ban-court
Circle freezes USDC in sanctioned wallets: https://www.theblock.co/post/162172/circle-freezes-usdc-funds-in-tornado-cashs-us-treasury-sanctioned-wallets 
Crypto exchange dYdX blocked accounts that received funds from Tornado Cash: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/11/crypto-exchange-dydx-blocked-accounts-that-received-even-small-amounts-from-tornado-cash/
The possibility of forking Tornado Cash: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/08/10/cloning-tornado-cash-would-be-easy-but-risky/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 hr 17 min