On the 8th of September, Coinbase went on to announce that it was bankrolling a lawsuit against the Treasury Department of the USA. The crypto exchange firm had decided that it would be funding a lawsuit that was brought up by six people that wanted to challenge the multiple sanctions that had been levied on Tornado Cash.
On the 9th of September, the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, announced that he had to work quite hard with Congress in order to bring about legislation that would increase the regulations of cryptocurrency. But, one shouldn’t consider both of the stories to be exclusive. This simply provides that any form of government was more prone to reaction than to pro-action when it came to decentralized finance.
Coinbase To Launch A Battle Against The Treasury Department
The firm that Coinbase has decided to bankroll the entire lawsuit for, Tornado Cash, had been previously sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control- all the way back in August. OFAC had claimed that the mixer of smart contracts had helped in laundering close to $7 billion of cryptocurrency since it had been created in 2019- which further included around $455 million being stolen by the North Korean-linked Hacker group called Lazarus Group.
The CEO of the exchange, Brian Armstrong then mentioned in an interview that the Treasury had gone too far and that it had been taking a couple of unprecedented steps of sanctioning an entire technology rather than focusing on specific individuals.
To this, Gary Gensler mentioned that he would be doubling down on tougher regulation of the DeFi market while claiming that crypto companies like Coinbase wouldn’t be able to survive without it. He mentioned that there was nothing about the crypto market that didn’t seem to be incompatible with the securities laws.
