Tornado Cash stated on Friday that it was blocking wallet addresses sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, using oracle contracts from Chainalysis.

The decision came after the US Treasury Department named North Korean cybercriminal Lazarus Group as a suspect in the recent $600 million+ Ronin Bridge exploit. 

The hackers reportedly delivered $80.3 million worth of Ether (ETH) through Tornado Cash. The Tornado Cash team stated, “Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom; however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance.”

Tornado Cash is a popular cryptocurrency mix that obfuscates transaction trails for anonymity. The Chainalysis Sanctions Oracle can check if a bitcoin wallet address is listed in a sanctions list issued by the US, the European Union, or the UN.

However, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov later explained that the instrument merely restricts access to the DApp interface, not the underlying smart contract.

Tornado Cash has been linked to a number of problematic decentralized financing practices. Hackers experimented using Tornado Cash with stolen assets in February’s $375 million Wormhole breach. During the same month, the LooksRare team utilized Tornado Cash to withdraw nearly $30 million in cryptocurrency.

Hackers used Tornado Cash to transmit stolen cash from a recent Rare Bears Discord phishing assault that nabbed $800,000 in nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The DApp was also used to launder assets from a $33 million Crypto.com hack.

Semenov, on the other hand, appears to be fed up with the protocol’s affiliation with alleged illegal acts, contemplating the possibility of jail time for noncompliance with regulators in limiting access to banned persons.