This Week on Crypto Twitter: Tornado Cash Sanctions Slammed, Vitalik Criticizes MakerDAO Proposal

This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

It should also be noted that Github—the code platform that hosted Tornado Cash’s code—also took action on Monday. Github removed Tornado’s code and suspended Tornado Cash founder Roman Semenov’s account.

Finally, on Friday, the Netherlands Crime Agency (FIOD) reported arresting a “suspected” Tornado Cash developer. The news made waves on Twitter, with the crypto community and privacy advocates decrying the move as a declaration of war on coders.

Elsewhere…

Joel Miyazawa, a governance analyst at crypto intelligence firm Messari, can’t understand why the UniSwap community is so divided over a $74 million proposal to form a UniSwap Foundation separate to the exchange.

Uniswap’s treasury is worth approximately $2 billion 🤯

The Uniswap Foundation proposal is asking for $74 million. That’s ~4% of Uniswap’s treasury…

And the Uniswap Community is divided. Why?

— Joel Miyazawa (@Ichiro_JJ) August 10, 2022

The Tornado Cash sanctions resulted in USDC issuer Circle freezing all USDC in wallets on the government’s sanctions list. This prompted MakerDAO to reconsider its exposure to Circle, the centralized issuer of USDC. MakerDAO’s stablecoin DAI is currently pegged to USDC.

But Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin quickly gave his opinion on the proposal, calling it “a risky and terrible idea.”

Errr this seems like a risky and terrible idea. If ETH drops a lot, value of collateral would go way down but CDPs would not get liquidated, so the whole system would risk becoming a fractional reserve.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 11, 2022

Chinese blockchain journalist Colin Wu elaborated more on the story on Friday.

Affected by the tornado sanctions, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen said that he is seriously considering moving away from using USDC as collateral and converting USDC into ETH. Vitalik said non-ETH collateral should be allowed to exceed 20% of the total. pic.twitter.com/x3ocsCq6KH

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 12, 2022

Finally, The Ethereum Merge has a definite date now.

The Ethereum mainnet merge has been tentatively scheduled for around September 15th/16th.

The Merge is coming 🐼

— sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 (@sassal0x) August 11, 2022

Well… More or less.

The terminal total difficulty has been set to 58750000000000000000000.

This means the ethereum PoW network now has a (roughly) fixed number of hashes left to mine.https://t.co/3um744WkxZ predicts the merge will happen around Sep 15, though the exact date depends on hashrate. pic.twitter.com/9YnloTWSi1

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 12, 2022