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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 3
  • Research debt items: 3

Coin Center v. Yellen

Summary

Coin Center v. Yellen, No. 3:22-cv-20375 (N.D. Fla. Oct. 30, 2023), granted summary judgment to Treasury on OFAC’s Tornado Cash designation.

Verified Facts

  • The case is captioned Coin Center, et al. v. Janet Yellen, et al., No. 3:22-cv-20375-TKW-ZCB, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division.1
  • Judge T. Kent Wetherell, II authored the October 30, 2023 opinion.1
  • Plaintiffs challenged OFAC’s designation of Tornado Cash; defendants included the Secretary of the Treasury, the Department of the Treasury, the OFAC Director, and OFAC.1
  • The opinion states that OFAC designated Tornado Cash on August 8, 2022, and that the designation was also challenged in a Western District of Texas case.1
  • The district court granted summary judgment for the Government, concluding Tornado Cash could be treated as an association and that members of the Tornado Cash entity had an interest in the core software tool under OFAC’s regulations.1
  • Treasury announced the August 8, 2022 OFAC designation of Tornado Cash under Executive Order 13694, as amended.2

Historical Context

Coin Center and individual plaintiffs filed suit in the Northern District of Florida after OFAC’s 2022 Tornado Cash sanctions. The district court upheld the designation in October 2023. Parallel litigation proceeded in the Western District of Texas and later in the Fifth Circuit.

Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida. Authority level: district-court summary-judgment opinion. The opinion’s association/property-interest analysis differs from the later Fifth Circuit approach in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury, which held immutable smart contracts are not IEEPA “property.” Later appellate disposition of the Florida case is not yet documented with a primary source on this page.

Relationships

  • CASE-COIN-CENTER-V-YELLEN cites SRC-COIN-CENTER-YELLEN-NDFLA-2023.
  • CASE-COIN-CENTER-V-YELLEN related_to TOPIC-TORNADO-CASH.
  • CASE-COIN-CENTER-V-YELLEN related_to CASE-VAN-LOON-V-TREASURY.

Sources

  1. SRC-COIN-CENTER-YELLEN-NDFLA-2023: Coin Center v. Yellen, No. 3:22-cv-20375 (N.D. Fla. Oct. 30, 2023).
  2. SRC-TREASURY-TC-AUG-2022: U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash (Aug. 8, 2022).

Research Debt

  • Add complaint and counsel listings (Consovoy McCarthy; Abraham Sutherland; Sasso & Sasso) from docket-primary sources.
  • Add Eleventh Circuit docket materials for vacatur/dismissal-as-moot after SDN delisting (reported July 2025).
  • Add plaintiff roster beyond Coin Center from the complaint (Patrick O’Sullivan; David Hoffman; John Doe) with primary citation.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2023-10-30
  • Last verified: 2026-07-23

  1. SRC-COIN-CENTER-YELLEN-NDFLA-2023 — Coin Center v. Yellen, No. 3:22-cv-20375 (N.D. Fla. Oct. 30, 2023). Primary authority (district court opinion PDF). ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-TREASURY-TC-AUG-2022 — U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash (Aug. 8, 2022). Official government press release. ↩