Sanctions Circumvention in Crypto: How People Bypass Restrictions and What It Means for You

When people try to move crypto despite government bans or restrictions, they’re engaging in sanctions circumvention, the act of using technology or methods to avoid financial rules imposed by authorities like the U.S. Treasury. Also known as crypto obfuscation, it’s not about stealing—it’s about access. In countries under heavy financial control or where exchanges are blocked, users turn to tools that hide transaction trails to keep their funds usable. This isn’t theoretical. In 2022, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, a decentralized crypto mixer that allowed users to anonymize Ethereum transactions. It wasn’t a company. It was code. And even after a court lifted the sanctions in 2025, the developers still face criminal charges. That’s how serious this gets.

Privacy coins, like Monero and Zcash, are built from the ground up to make transactions untraceable. Unlike Bitcoin, where every transfer is public, these coins use advanced cryptography to hide sender, receiver, and amount. That’s why exchanges from the U.S. to Europe have quietly delisted them. Regulators don’t ban them because they’re dangerous—they ban them because they’re too private. And that’s exactly why people still use them. In places like Algeria, where crypto is fully illegal, or in regions under international sanctions, privacy coins are the only way to hold value without being tracked. Meanwhile, OFAC sanctions, the U.S. government’s tool to block financial activity with targeted entities or countries, have forced exchanges to cut off users from Iran, North Korea, Syria, and others. But those users didn’t disappear—they moved to unregulated platforms, peer-to-peer markets, or mixers that don’t ask questions. The result? A growing underground network of crypto tools designed not for crime, but for survival in a world where financial freedom is tied to geography.

What you’ll find in the posts below are real cases: how Tornado Cash worked before it was taken down, why privacy coins keep getting delisted, and which exchanges are too risky to touch because they’re invisible or unlicensed. You’ll also see how people are still finding ways to move value—through wrapped tokens, regional stablecoins, or even gaming tokens with no real utility but high anonymity. This isn’t about breaking the law. It’s about understanding how the system works when it shuts doors—and what happens when people find the windows.