Tornado Cash (TORN) saw its price rise nearly 5% on Monday, trading at $9.67, after news broke that a U.S. appeals court had officially ended a lawsuit challenging the Treasury Department’s sanctions against the crypto mixer.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 3 to dismiss the case brought by Coin Center, a crypto policy advocacy group, against the U.S. Treasury and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The court’s decision followed OFAC’s earlier removal of Tornado Cash from its sanctions list in March and a separate Fifth Circuit ruling that barred OFAC from sanctioning smart contracts.
Coin Center and the Treasury had jointly requested that the Eleventh Circuit vacate a Texas district court’s April ruling, which had permanently blocked OFAC from reimposing sanctions on Tornado Cash. With the lower court’s ruling becoming final and unappealable on June 28, both parties agreed the appeal had become moot.
Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh called the ruling a win for crypto freedom, stating that the government abandoned its “dangerously overbroad interpretation of sanctions laws.”
Despite the end of the sanctions battle, the U.S. government is still pursuing criminal charges against Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov. Storm’s money laundering trial is scheduled to begin on June 14, 2026, in New York.
The decision marks a significant moment for privacy advocates in the crypto industry, highlighting ongoing tensions between regulatory enforcement and decentralized technologies. Tornado Cash’s brief price rally reflects renewed investor interest following the legal clarity on its sanction status, although uncertainty remains due to the pending criminal trials.
