THELOGICALINDIAN - The US Treasury Department has accustomed a cryptocurrency mixer for the aboriginal time Blender is now banned in the United States
The Office of Foreign Assets Control said that North Korean hackers had afresh acclimated Blender to acquit agenda assets.
U.S. Treasury Sanctions Blender
The U.S. Treasury Department has amorphous anchor bottomward on cryptocurrency mixers.
The government’s bread-and-butter and accounts appointment added the basic bill mixer Blender to its list of accustomed entities Friday, citation its acceptance amid North Korean state-sponsored cyber attacks. The Appointment of Foreign Assets Control adapted its “Specially Designated Nationals” List to accommodate Blender’s assorted website domains alongside a host of agenda bill addresses. The Treasury said that Blender had helped North Korea-backed hackers acquit $550 actor baseborn from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network in March.
Virtual bill mixers like Blender advice users bottle their aloofness back affective agenda assets by obfuscating their transaction history. They about assignment by pooling affairs calm and sending them out to new addresses, acceptation a sender can drop bill and abjure them from a new, “clean” address. This makes their aisle of action abundant harder to trace on a accessible blockchain ledger. As mixers advice users break clandestine back application crypto, they’re bargain acclimated by criminals. Most DeFi hacks on Ethereum, for example, tend to advance to Tornado Cash, a accepted mixer that leverages zero-knowledge proofs to advice users awning their advance on the blockchain.
The latest amend from the Treasury’s OFAC sets a antecedent because it’s the aboriginal time the U.S. has accustomed a cryptocurrency mixer. In contempo months, the United States has been tracking North Korea-linked cyber attackers and aftermost ages declared that Lazarus Accumulation was abaft the Ronin Network heist. In January, the cybersecurity close Kaspersky warned that BlueNoroff, one of Lazarus Group’s amount units, had acclimated phishing attacks on crypto startups, while DeFiance Capital’s Arthur Cheong claimed to accept affirmation that the accumulation was amenable for the $1.7 actor NFT annexation he suffered in March.
Though this is the aboriginal time a mixer has been added to the U.S. sanctions list, mixers accept become a hot affair of altercation in the crypto apple in contempo months. Tornado Cash sparked controversy aftermost ages back it appear that it had started application a Chainalysis answer to block accustomed users from its frontend, adopting questions about its amount of censorship attrition and decentralization. As mixers are generally the aboriginal anchorage of alarm for cryptocurrency abyss afterward an attack, Blender may not be the aftermost one that ends up on OFAC’s ban list.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the columnist of this allotment endemic ETH and several added cryptocurrencies.
