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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.
Read more: Tornado Cash Sanctions Overturned by U.S. Appeals Court
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.
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 3206.01, up 1.3% (+41.12) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
Nineteen of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: UNI (+7.2%) and AVAX (+3.5%).
Laggards: AAVE (-1.6%) and BTC (+0.2%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
Guatemala’s largest bank, Banco Industrial, has adopted blockchain firm SukuPay’s stablecoin rails for customers to send remittances from the U.S.
SukuPay will allow Guatemalans to receive funds from the U.S. for a flat 99 cent fee using only a phone number within their Banco National mobile app Zigi, according to an emailed announcement on Wednesday.
«This integration marks the first time a crypto-native protocol has gone live at this depth inside a top-tier Latin American retail bank,» SukuPay said in the announcement.
SukuPay’s developer Suku unveiled the payment tool in April 2024 as a way of allowing cross-border money transfers without the need to create a crypto wallet. It is built on Ethereum scaling network Polygon and uses the USDC stablecoin.
Stablecoins, now a nearly $230 billion asset class, are one of crypto’s most practical success stories. Pegged to fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar, they’ve become popular tools for payments, remittances and savings—especially in developing countries where banking access is limited or local currencies are volatile.
SukuPay’s integration into Banco Industrial underlines the trend how blockchain-based rails are quietly entering the financial mainstream, not as investment vehicles but as invisible plumbing for real-world money movement.
Remittances to Guatemala number around $21 billion annually, which is nearly 20% of the country’s GDP.
Only 35% of Guatemalan adults had access to formal bank accounts as of 2022, according to the World Bank’s Findex Data, making it a prime market for tools that can improve financial inclusion.
Crypto hedge fund Temple Capital has expanded its senior management team with hires from Hilbert Capital, BlueCrest and Brevan Howard, the company said in a press release Wednesday.
Guy Griffiths has joined as chief financial officer, the company said. He was previously employed by macro hedge fund Brevan Howard in London for 19 years.
Richard Murray, former CEO of crypto asset manager Hilbert Capital, has joined Temple Capital as a partner of the firm. He was also a former executive at Brevan.
Cristian-Teodor Tudor, formerly lead quant developer at BlueCrest, has joined the investment firm as a quant researcher.
Temple Capital currently manages $120 million in assets and is backed by Bain Capital and Pantera Capital.
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