U.S. Sanctions Bitcoin Mixer Blender for Helping Launder $20.5M to North Korea

The Unit­ed States on Fri­day sanc­tioned cryp­tocur­ren­cy mix­ing ser­vice Blender for alleged­ly help­ing North Kore­an hack­ers laun­der around $20.5 mil­lion stolen from the Axie Infin­i­ty hack at the end of March.

Blender is a Bit­coin-based tool used by cryp­to investors to obscure their trans­ac­tions, mak­ing it hard­er to trace. The mix­er has report­ed­ly facil­i­tat­ed the trans­fer of over $500 mil­lion worth of bit­coin since incep­tion in 2017.

Blender becomes first mixer to be sanctioned

The sanc­tions, imposed by the U.S. Trea­sury Department’s Office of For­eign Con­trol (OFAC), are the first ever on a cryp­to asset mix­er, accord­ing to a state­ment.

The Trea­sury accused Blender of help­ing North Kore­an-backed hack­er group Lazarus wash more than $20.5 mil­lion in cryp­tocur­ren­cy stolen from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Net­work bridge on March 23. In total, Lazarus Group made off with $620 mil­lion from the heist.

Trea­sury said the mix­ing ser­vice was also used to facil­i­tate mon­ey-laun­der­ing for Russ­ian-linked ran­somware groups such as Trick­bot, Con­ti, Ryuk and others.

“We are tak­ing action against illic­it finan­cial activ­i­ty by the DPRK [North Korea] and will not allow state-spon­sored thiev­ery and its mon­ey-laun­der­ing enablers to go unan­swered,” Bri­an Nel­son, the Trea­sury under-sec­re­tary for ter­ror­ism and finan­cial intel­li­gence, said in the statement.

Four wal­let address­es tied to the Lazarus Group, which has been under sanc­tions since 2019, were also added to the Treasury’s list of sanc­tioned enti­ties. The Trea­sury said it will con­tin­ue to inves­ti­gate the use of mix­ing ser­vices for illic­it purposes.

Ethereum mixer bends to U.S. sanctions pressure

In April, the U.S. imposed its first set of sanc­tions against cryp­to min­ing firm Bitriv­er AG and 10 of its sub­sidiaries, which it accused of sup­port­ing Russia.

Ethereum-based mix­er Tor­na­do Cash has since announced that it has start­ed to block address­es sanc­tioned by the OFAC, wor­ried it would run afoul of the range of U.S. embargoes.

“Main­tain­ing finan­cial pri­va­cy is essen­tial to pre­serv­ing our free­dom, how­ev­er, it should not come at the cost of non-com­pli­ance,” Tor­na­do Cash said.

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