Tornado Cash arrest heralds storm season for crypto mixers

From the Editor’s Desk

Dear Reader,

“Shaken, not stirred” is the way the world’s favorite British secret service agent likes his martinis mixed. This week, it’s the way some in the crypto world are feeling.

As if the seemingly interminable crypto winter weren’t enough for them, crypto libertarians in the Netherlands have been sufficiently shaken up to mount a demonstration against the arrest of Alexey Pertsev, a developer who has been linked to the mixer Tornado Cash.  

Tornado Cash is a cause célèbre for a certain section of the crypto community, but it’s also a means of concealing fund flows that hadn’t sat well with regulators since they first heard of Bitcoin and the alarm was raised over the prospect that cryptocurrencies were a conduit of criminality.

The whole point of crypto mixers is to obscure money trails so they’re difficult to trace back to their original sources — the same way money movements in the fiat world can be secreted behind shell companies. Both have legitimate uses, but both are also tools used to hide things. And Tornado Cash’s alleged use by North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group will only add to the political pressure to rein it in — alongside other crypto mixers.

If the digital asset industry has learned one thing over the years, it’s that if it wants to be taken seriously and thrive, it had better get right with regulators, who — rest assured — will be relentless in their pursuit of wrongdoing, and whose capabilities for cracking down on it are constantly improving.

The mission remains: How does innovation thrive while seeking first to be understood? It’s a question we’ll be exploring this week at our Crypto Rising virtual event, where we’ll examine the future of regulation for the digital asset sector in Asia-Pacific and beyond. There needs to be more consistency in the crypto conversation worldwide — I dare say there’s currently little of that. But things could — and should — be changing. The world still needs saving, 007.

Until the next time,

Angie Lau,
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Forkast.News

Forkast.Insights | What does it mean?

U.S. regulators have long expressed annoyance at the existence of crypto mixer services, and in May imposed their first-ever sanctions against one of them, Blender.io. The crackdown on Tornado Cash is part of ongoing American efforts to stop North Korea’s state-sponsored crypto hackers from swapping stolen crypto for cash to help prop up the regime of the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un. 

But in taking action, OFAC has raised difficult questions about the very nature of decentralized networks. The regulator’s intervention is targeting validators in an attempt to force them to refuse transactions from Tornado Cash. Although many in the Ethereum community have vowed not to comply with the demand, the infrastructure upon which many validators depend won’t necessarily back them up. 

Estimates suggest that more than half of all nodes maintaining Ethereum make use of Amazon Web Services. In January last year, AWS kicked far-right social network Parler off its servers over its role in spreading hate speech. AWS did so not because it was compelled by law enforcement, but because Parler’s actions were held to have violated the company’s terms of service. If OFAC comes knocking on Amazon’s door, it seems unlikely that AWS would put up much resistance.

Forkast.Insights | What does it mean?

Upgrading cryptocurrency networks is notoriously difficult. Ethereum’s timetable for upgrading its network frequently slips, and some updates have been postponed for more than a year. There are two key reasons for this. 

The first is technical. The complexity of blockchains creates a number of “attack vectors” for hackers to exploit, meaning that any upgrade has to be strenuously tested before it can be deployed. 

The second reason blockchains are so hard to upgrade is due to governance. Because blockchains, for the most part, are designed not to be run by a centralized entity, gaining consensus is notoriously difficult. That means discussions on upgrades can last for months, if not years, slowing a blockchain’s development to a crawl. 

But even if consensus is reached, network upgrades often require validators and miners to hard-fork a network to run a new version of the software that underpins it. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Bitcoin’s network is littered with nodes not running the most up-to-date software, further compounding the network’s ability to upgrade itself.   

Cardano is finding this out firsthand. To outsiders, this appears concerning. For insiders, it’s business as usual.

Forkast.Insights | What does it mean?

Ongoing heatwaves and droughts have led to power outages in some parts of China, prompting many factories in the southwestern province of Sichuan to halt operations, which has hurt the world’s second-largest economy.

Sichuan, a province with abundant hydropower generation resources, was one of the world’s largest hubs for crypto miners before China imposed a blanket ban on mining last year. The mining ban, however, did not extend to the mining rig manufacturing sector, and Canaan continues to operate from its headquarters in Beijing.

But as many Chinese miners have moved out of China since China’s ban came into effect, there’s an inevitability about Canaan following suit. Last year, Canaan set up its first repair service center outside of China in Kazakhstan, a neighboring country that many Chinese crypto miners had fled to. Canaan Senior Vice President Edward Lu told Forkast in a recent interview that the mining hardware giant had also been eyeing the U.S. mining market and planned to build warehouses and maintenance facilities to support expected growth in mining operations there.

But are Canaan’s U.S. expansion plans now under a cloud? Canaan Chief Executive Nangeng (NG) Zhang is now warning that the company’s performance would come under pressure in the coming one to two quarters. He said on an earnings call last week that lower Bitcoin prices and rising energy costs were “seriously impacting” demand among miners for computing power, and that they would continue to do so “for some time in the future.”

Lu, nonetheless, appears to remain optimistic about the outlook for the industry, telling Forkast that the crypto winter may be shorter than expected and that the company’s revenue was driven mainly by long-term partnerships with large, institutional clients that were also “well prepared” for market downturns. 

The Nasdaq-listed mining rig maker has repeatedly said it’s positioned to weather a challenging environment, but that didn’t stop it from predicting a third-quarter revenue slump of 17% to 32% from the same period the previous year. It remains to be seen how Canaan’s U.S. expansion plans will play out with the market headwinds facing the company.