Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN), criticized the U.S. Treasury’s recent filing that seeks to moot the necessity of a final court judgment regarding Tornado Cash after having delisted the crypto mixer from the sanctions list.

On Friday, the Treasury Department’s sanctions watchdog removed Tornado Cash from its global blacklist while also removing over 100 ether (ETH) addresses from the Specially Designated Nationals list. The platform was backlisted in 2022 for its alleged role in laundering $445 million stolen by the North Korea-linked Lazarus cybercrime group.

The Treasury then argued that the action of delisting Tornado Cash resolved the issue at hand and that a final court ruling ordering it to remove the crypto mixer from its sanctions list was no longer necessary, according to a court filing dated March 21.

Grewal, however, said the Treasury’s attempts to have the case declared moot is an attempt to sidestep a ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that will leave the door open for a renewed blacklisting and sanctions.

«After grudgingly delisting TC, they now claim they’ve mooted any need for a final court judgment. But that’s not the law, and they know it,» Grewal said on X. «Under the voluntary cessation exception, a defendant’s decision to end a challenged practice moots a case only if the defendant can show that the practice cannot ‘reasonably be expected to recur.'»

Coinbase funded the court case that made its way to the appeals court, Van Loon vs. Treasury.

Grewal cited the example of the FBI v. Fikre case, in which the government removed Yonas Fikre, a U.S. citizen and Sudanese emigree, from the No Fly List, and argued in court that this action rendered Fikre’s lawsuit moot. Fikre had brought a lawsuit alleging that the government unlawfully placed him on the No Fly List.

But, the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision saying that the party seeking to moot a case based on its own voluntary cessation of challenged conduct must show that the conduct cannot “reasonably be expected to recur.”

In Tornado Cash’s case, the Treasury hasn’t provided any assurance that it won’t re-sanction the crypto mixer.

«Here, Treasury has likewise removed the Tornado Cash entities from the SDN, but has provided no assurance that it will not re-list Tornado Cash again. That’s not good enough, and will make this clear to the district court,» Grewal noted.

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2788.33, up 4.9% (+130.03) since 4 p.m. ET on Friday.

All 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: AVAX (+15.6%) and SOL (+11.8%).

Laggards: BCH (+0.6%) and LTC (+1.0%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Tabit Insurance, a Barbados-regulated insurance company established by former executives from the now-shuttered cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex, said it raised a $40 million reserve composed entirely of bitcoin (BTC) with which to write traditional insurance and reinsurance business.

The insurer, which emerged in January of this year with plans to offer bitcoin-backed liability policies for company directors and officers (D&O), claims to be the first regulated risk carrier to rely on bitcoin-only reserves to write traditional policies priced in U.S. dollars. The firm has a class 2 insurance license from the Barbados Financial Services Commission.

The crossover between crypto and insurance usually involves shoehorning existing risk categories for loss and theft into covering hot and cold versions of digital assets custody. Tabit’s approach is interesting because it explores ways firms and individuals can capitalize on their bitcoin holdings without getting involved in trading or incurring significant counterparty risk.

Tabit co-founder and CEO Stephen Stonberg said bitcoin holders are invited to contribute assets to the firm’s system of segregated reserve cells, which is managed using non-custodial tech from Fireblocks, to earn yields of around 10%. A good analogy from the world of insurance is the way accredited investors, known as “Names,” deploy assets into insurance syndicates at the Lloyd’s of London insurance market.

“For a technology like crypto, you may need a new underwriter, but the way the insurance is done is fundamentally the same as before,” Stonberg said in an interview. “We are holding our regulatory capital in bitcoin, and I think bringing in a new capital source to the insurance industry and innovating with the balance sheet is an opportunity that other people weren’t really looking at.”