tl;dr
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the Northern District of Florida’s 2023 order upholding Treasury sanctions against Tornado Cash and directed dismissal of the case, ending the Coin Center v. Yellen appeal. No party plans Supreme Court review. The district court had ruled Tornado Cash’s ...
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on July 3 vacated the Northern District of Florida’s 2023 order that had upheld the Treasury’s sanctions against Tornado Cash, directing the lower court to dismiss the case. This one-page mandate concludes the Coin Center v. Yellen appeal, which was the only remaining legal challenge concerning OFAC’s designation of the Ethereum-based privacy mixer in August 2022. Consequently, the Northern District must issue a brief dismissal on remand to enforce the appellate court’s mandate.
No party has indicated plans to seek Supreme Court review of the vacatur order, as such a process would require a new appeal following a fresh judgment, a scenario rendered unlikely by the recent delisting. The district court had previously ruled on October 30, 2023, that Tornado Cash qualified as an “association,” with its smart contracts constituting blocked property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), thereby granting summary judgment to the Treasury. Coin Center’s appeal, filed in November 2023, sparked a circuit split when the Fifth Circuit reversed a Texas district court’s view in the Van Loon v. Treasury case on November 26, 2024, ruling that immutable smart-contract code does not qualify as property and cannot be sanctioned.
Following this split, the Treasury opted not to petition the Supreme Court post-Van Loon. Instead, on March 21, it delisted all Tornado Cash addresses, announcing that newer, more targeted enforcement tools would better address illicit cryptocurrency flows. This delisting effectively eliminated the factual injury alleged by the Coin Center plaintiffs, prompting both parties to jointly request the Eleventh Circuit to vacate the earlier district court ruling and remand with instructions to dismiss the case due to mootness. The appellate panel granted this request, officially closing appellate docket 23-13698.
Despite the legal developments, there is limited practical change for the Tornado Cash protocol itself. It continues to operate on-chain without centralized control, while its governance token, TORN, remains actively traded on decentralized exchanges that have never delisted it. The delisting and dismissal do not impact ongoing criminal prosecutions against Tornado Cash co-founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, who face money laundering charges in the Southern District of New York. Nor do they address broader liability questions concerning developers for downstream uses of autonomous code, issues that are more likely to be settled through future enforcement actions rather than this now-closed civil case.
With sanctions lifted and litigation concluded, Tornado Cash now returns to a regulatory grey area akin to the environment before August 2022. Meanwhile, OFAC signals that it may pursue more narrowly tailored designations targeting privacy tools that demonstrably facilitate activities of sanctioned actors, indicating a possible shift toward precision in crypto-related regulatory enforcement.