FinCEN scrapped two crypto proposals on 6 October. Neither was in force, and Blender.io is still on the SDN List

FinCEN published two withdrawal notices in the Federal Register on 6 October 2026. Both are signed by Deputy Director Jimmy L. Kirby, and both take effect "as of" that date.

Read the last two rows first. Neither original was a final rule. Nobody was required to report anything under either, so the withdrawals take away a future duty, not a current one.

The 2023 proposal defined "CVC mixing" as facilitating transactions in a way that obscures source, destination or amount. It listed six examples: pooling funds from several wallets, using code to structure a transaction, splitting and sending through independent transactions, creating single-use wallets, exchanging between types of virtual currency, and facilitating user-initiated delays.

Covered institutions that knew, suspected or had reason to suspect a transaction involved mixing within or involving a jurisdiction outside the United States would have filed a report. The notice lists what it would have contained: amount, currency type, the mixer used, the customer's wallet address, transaction hashes, dates and IP addresses, plus a narrative. The institution would also have kept customer identity records.

FinCEN gives two reasons for withdrawing. Commenters said the definition was so wide it could have "a chilling effect on legitimate activity" and place a large reporting burden on institutions. The notice also cites the July 2025 report of the President's Working Group on Digital Asset Markets. That report acknowledged that lawful users may use mixers for financial privacy, and it recommended that Treasury consider next steps on the proposal.

The notice does not say mixers are harmless. FinCEN writes that illicit actors continue to use mixers and other tools to hinder law enforcement investigations, that it will keep monitoring, and that it may take appropriate steps later.

The 2020 proposal reached transfers between a bank or money services business and a wallet that was either unhosted or "otherwise covered". The second term meant a wallet held at a foreign institution outside the Bank Secrecy Act, in a jurisdiction FinCEN identified. It set two triggers:

The 2026 notice says FinCEN is withdrawing the proposal as part of the Trump administration's efforts to make digital asset regulation "fit-for-purpose", and that it "will take no further action". Unlike the mixing notice, it leaves no door ajar.

A withdrawal of reporting proposals changes nothing about who is blocked. We downloaded OFAC's SDN.XML (publish date 8 October 2026, 19,416 records) and counted the identifier fields typed as a digital currency address.

The two mixers we looked for are still in that file. Blender.io carries 46 address fields under the CYBER2 programme tag. Sinbad carries 2, tagged CYBER2 and DPRK3. Tornado Cash is not in the file. OFAC deleted it on 21 March 2025, and the entry's Ethereum addresses went with it.

So the practical position for a US-facing firm is split. A filing duty that was only ever proposed is gone. A prohibition on dealing with a listed mixer, and with the addresses printed against it, is exactly where it was on 5 October.

On the evidence we read, nothing is triggered. These are US measures, and the proposals were never final, so a European firm with a US bank as a counterparty loses no legal obligation it had on 5 October. What it may lose is a prediction: if a US correspondent had told you to expect mixer or wallet reporting, that expectation is now weaker.

We do not state what EU or UK law requires on self-hosted wallets. We did not open the EU Transfer of Funds Regulation, MiCA or any UK instrument for this post, and neither notice refers to any of them. Check those yourself before you change a procedure on the strength of a US withdrawal.

1. Keep address-level SDN checks. Match wallet addresses in your transaction data against the typed address fields, per asset, and record the list version.
2. Leave mixer-exposure controls in place until your own risk assessment says otherwise. FinCEN's notice itself says the risk persists.
3. Retire any task tracking the two proposals (final rule watch, comment drafting, system changes for the proposed reports) and note the date.
4. Do not read the withdrawal as a delisting. The Federal Register notices change no SDN entry.
5. Note the mixing door left open. FinCEN says it may take appropriate steps in the future; put a review date against that.

We screen the names of people and companies against sanctions, watchlist and adverse-media sources, and the developer API does the same from your own onboarding flow. We are not claiming wallet-address matching here. For that, use OFAC's file as described above; the counts in this post come from it, not from our system.

This is a report of what two Federal Register notices say, as published on 6 October 2026, and of the contents of OFAC's SDN.XML dated 8 October 2026. It takes no position on the merits of either proposal.

We did not read the original 2020 and 2023 proposals, only FinCEN's summaries of them in the withdrawal notices. We did not check FinCEN's website for a press statement, and we opened no EU or UK instrument. The address counts are counts of identifier fields in one file on one date; some address strings repeat across fields, so the 1,066 fields hold 1,050 distinct strings by exact match. The notices are FinCEN's, not OFAC's, and a listed mixer stays listed until OFAC removes it.