Vitalik Buterin Donated $1M in Ether to Coin Center Hours After Tornado Cash Victory

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated 320 ether — worth over $1 million — to crypto think tank Coin Center on Tuesday night, according to blockchain data.

Buterin’s donation came mere hours after a U.S. appeals court overturned U.S. sanctions against embattled crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, ruling that Tornado Cash’s smart contracts “are not the property of a foreign national or entity” and thus cannot be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). By imposing sanctions on Tornado Cash, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) “overstepped its congressionally defined authority,” the court ruled.

Coin Center has been a key player in the crypto industry’s fight against the U.S. government’s sanctions against Tornado Cash. OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022, claiming it helped to launder more than $7 billion in cryptocurrency, including hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by North Korea’s notorious hacking group, the Lazarus Group.

In October 2022, Coin Center filed suit against Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the Treasury Department, OFAC and OFAC’s then-Director Andrea Gacki accusing them of overstepping their authority and violating the First Amendment in sanctioning Tornado Cash. When a district court judge dismissed the case a year later, Coin Center appealed his ruling with a higher court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. That case is still ongoing.

In addition to fighting sanctions against Tornado Cash, Coin Center has been involved in the defense of Tornado Cash’s developers, filing an amicus brief in support of developer Roman Storm’s motion to dismiss the government’s case against him.

Though Buterin hasn’t been as directly involved in the Tornado Cash cases as Coin Center, he has made his support — for both the mixing service itself as well as its embattled developers — clear. Shortly after OFAC first sanctioned Tornado Cash, Buterin publicly stated that he’d used the service to donate money to Ukraine. Earlier this year, he donated 30 ETH, worth over $100,000, to the legal defense fund for Storm and fellow developer Roman Semenov.

Buterin did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.