devs were mostly anonymous, IIRC. Coindesk says “Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov's GitHub was suspended.” [1]
> What will happen to the tainted money? This figure is about 400M$. I expect a secondary market for TCtETH (Tornado cash tainted ETH)
indeed. the feds haven’t seized any money. the 10,000s of TC users still have anonymized possession of decent sums of money and have effectively been told “you can’t legally use this for goods and services”. have the feds just created a bunch of $1000 coupons for DNMs?
> What happens to the protocols/pools/(d)apps which interacted with it?
contract still live, i assume. i think it was governed by a DAO so if they haven’t/don’t hurry up and lock that down there’s risk of a malicious takeover as the TORN token devalues. if you blacklisted everything that these tokens interact with you'd blacklist like 10% of crypto. AMMs and bridges are in some sense just a much more diffuse tumbling service. i guess it works for now because most people running Ren nodes (for example) don't understand that they're helping people launder, whereas the TC service is much more in-your-face.
Tornado Cash published their UI a month ago. their GitHub’s been taken down but i expect mirrors will surface. it should be totally possible to keep using the service — expect significantly decreased liquidity — and the fun part (for me) will be to sit and watch to what degree the decreased normie use of TC kills the thing v.s. just slows it down.
the GitHub ban is a warning to me though. i’m in (non-crypto) circles where we largely host our own repos, but few of us publicly mirror the software we build upon. makes me think i should start doing so in advance.
[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/08/08/crypto-mixing-ser...