Tornado Cash and the onchain implications crypto privacy

Tornado Cash has been removed from the U.S. Treasury Department's OFAC sanctions list, a change the article presents as significant for privacy technology and for people who write and publish code. The article says one reason cited for the reversal is that the underlying smart contracts do not possess ownership status, and it notes that a recent U.S. appeals court decision made clear the code itself is not legally responsible. Several core developers still face money laundering-related charges in the U.S., and one is serving a five-year prison sentence in the Netherlands. The author, Daniel McGlynn, writes that the transparency versus privacy tension in onchain activity will grow more contentious before resolution.