A professor at Johns Hopkins University re-uploads Tornado Cash code to GitHub for educational reasons

Several days after Tornado Cash, an Ethereum (ETH) mixing service, was suspended for allegedly facilitating money laundering, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University who goes by the name “Matthew Green,” posted the business’s source code on GitHub.

Green claimed in a GitHub post published on August 24 that the initiative to release the code is intended to assist teaching and study on issues such as bitcoin privacy.

Despite the fact that Github has previously removed the code, Green justified his choice to utilize the platform, arguing that it is “the most widely-used software distribution website in the world” and so an acceptable location to host this repository.

Green noted that he had offline copies of the code and would republish it on another site if GitHub became unreachable. Green said that he has no reason to assume that GitHub objects to the re-publication of the code.

Notably, Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for failing to adopt steps to prevent money laundering. In this line, Microsoft-owned GitHub deleted the source code and disabled the accounts of users who contributed code to the project.

United States government criticism

Moreover, Green criticized the United States government for encouraging what he dubbed economic sanctions, given that a number of cryptocurrency exchanges have prohibited their customers from engaging with the Tornado Cash smart contract address.

Notably, the United States government has been criticized for banning the mixer, with Jesse Powell, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, stating that the measure is a “knee-jerk response” to safeguard consumers, particularly following the Terra (LUNA) catastrophe.

In addition, the crypto community has questioned the decision to arrest Alexey Pertsev, the creator of Tornado Cash. At the same time, Terra creator Do Kwon is free, despite having been cited for contributing to the accident.

Also Read: The Tornado Cash incident highlights legal difficulties impacting the crypto sector