The Chopping Block: Why DeFi May Be Over-Complying With Tornado Cash Sanctions - Ep. 392

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Jill Gunter, the empress of Espresso, also joined the conversation. 

Show topics:

• Whether product management is the new consulting
• What is going to happen with macroeconomics and whether monetary policy is data-driven
• Why Jill’s faith is getting renewed, especially after listening to Fed authorities
• The TL;DR on the Ava Labs conspiracy story
• Why the industry needs a decentralized RPC
• The role of Flashbots and Ethermine in censoring transactions 
• Potential over-compliance from the biggest crypto projects on how to deal with sanctioned addresses
• Whether social slashing allows Ethereum to stay uncensored
• The importance of educating regulators on crypto
• What Haseeb thinks lawyers would recommend to Coinbase about validating transactions from sanctioned addresses
• The significance of both transactional and application-layer privacy
• How stablecoin providers need to implement some basic levels of privacy
• Why corporations do not run Ethereum and whether users are pro-OFAC restrictions

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
• https://twitter.com/hosseeb
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital
• https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt

Guest

Jill Gunter

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jillrgunter

Episode Links

Tornado Cash

• Treasury Press release 
• Tornado Cash developer arrested 
• Circle freezes USDC in sanctioned wallets
• Crypto exchange dYdX blocked accounts that received funds from Tornado Cash
• What the sanctions mean for privacy coins
• Celebrities get dusted
• Previous coverage of the Tornado Cash Sanctions on Unchained:
• Is TRM Labs Blocking Addresses From DeFi Protocols? Ari Redbord Says No 
• Tornado Cash Sanctioned. Did the Government Overstep Its Bounds?
• The Chopping Block: Did OFAC Overstep by Sanctioning Tornado Cash?

Ava Labs Accusations:

• CoinDesk article 
• Crypto Leaks article

Social Slashing and Censorship on ETH

• Axios summary of the situation
• BitMex research on how the sanctions affect Ethereum
• Ethermine banning transactions
• Nic Carter’s article
• Eric Wall’s article on social slashing
• Hetzner banning Ethereum users
• Previous Coverage on Unchained
• Given the Sanctions on Tornado Cash, Is Ethereum Censorship Resistant?

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