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Over 100 advocates gathered outside the Elizabeth Detention Center, the only remaining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) detention facility in New Jersey, to commemorate the first anniversary of a landmark bill to ban detention agreements.

"One year ago today, immigrants in New Jersey made national headlines after we secured a victory that dealt a serious blow to I.C.E.'s detention system and enforcement reach. Immigrants brought the fight from within the walls of detention centers straight to the halls of the Trenton statehouse to deliver a ban on I.C.E. detention agreements," said Amy Torres from New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. "It was the organizing prowess of immigrants that positioned New Jersey as one of just a handful of states to prohibit I.C.E. detention agreements. We led the East Coast as the first state to have such a ban and since have been joined by others in introducing or passing similar measures. The call for immigrant justice will not be ignored."

The law that enacted the ban barred future I.C.E. detention contracts, but the political windfall from the decision ultimately led to the closure of three county detention centers in the state.

Hudson, Essex, and Bergen County jails have all ended their I.C.E. detention agreements. Although the bill passed the legislature in June of 2021, the Elizabeth Detention Center quietly extended its contract before Governor Murphy signed the bill into law in August.

The contract is now slated to end in late summer 2023. Community members impacted by I.C.E.'s presence in New Jersey spoke about the need to release those detained and provide greater protections to immigrants.

"When I was detained at the Elizabeth Detention Center after a workplace raid, I worried I would never see my daughters' smiling faces again. No one should have to experience that fear. No one should be detained or incarcerated in the Garden State. We demand the closure of the Elizabeth I.C.E. detention center and the immediate release of all detainees. If New Jersey is to live up to its promise as a fair and just state, we must pass the Values Act immediately so that no one has to face what I did," said Jenny, a spokesperson from Make the Road NJ

"A year ago, New Jersey took a step in ending detention and demonstrating that it is not a practice that is fair or humane to our immigrant friends. Although three of the four centers no longer detain our friends, the Elizabeth Detention Center continues to incarcerate our friends and strip them from their freedom. We will continue to push for justice for our friends until each of them is released and they are treated with the justice and dignity they deserve," said Jackie Zapata with First Friends of New Jersey and New York

New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (N.J.A.I.J.), the state's largest immigration coalition, hosted a rally featuring individuals and families impacted by I.C.E. enforcement, performers, organizers, and advocates at the Elizabeth Detention Center to commemorate the anniversary.

The crowd used the moment to call the community to action, advocating for greater protections that systematically address how immigrants are targeted by and vulnerable to I.C.E. arrest, namely through The Values Act (S512/A1986), a State bill, and federal reforms, like the New Way Forward Act (H.R. 536).

"No human being should live with the anxiety that we could get separated from our families for simply going to work or dropping our children at school. It takes an emotional toll on everyone and is a feeling you never forget. Before New Jersey O.A.G.'s Immigrant Trust Directive in our community, we were constantly afraid that someone in our family would question our immigration status because that could mean being deported. The Values Act will make the safety and security of the Immigrant Trust Directive permanent. We remember what that was like before the Directive, and we won't go back," said Ana Cerrato, a Wind of the Spirit Immigrant Resource Center member.

"New Jersey's ban on I.C.E. contracts now one year old stands as an important milestone for respecting the rights and dignity of immigrant communities. But at the same time, more action is urgently needed to ensure that our state is fairer and more welcoming to all New Jerseyans, regardless of immigration status. The Values Act will further our state's commitment to drawing a clear line between state and local government and the federal deportation machine. Alongside our partners in the immigrants' rights community, we continue to call on our state representatives to pass the Values Act," said Ami Kachalia from the ACLU-NJ.

"Today, we rally to celebrate and remember the passage of the anti-detention law signed by Governor Murphy on the same day last year. We celebrate that Elizabeth Detention Center, run by Core-Civic, is the only remaining detention facility in N.J. and will finally close next year," Glendy Tsitouras, Community Organizer with the American Friends Service Committee. "But we must call for a pathway to permanent residency, protection for our community, and an end to collaborations between local law enforcement agencies and I.C.E. Passing the Values Act will be a big step towards making N.J. a safe place to live for everyone."

"Today's anniversary is a testament to New Jersey's progress toward becoming a fair and welcoming state for all," said Nicole Rodriguez, President of New Jersey Policy Perspective (N.J.P.P.). "But more must be done. Immigration detention is unjust and does irreparable harm to our families and communities. It's time state lawmakers address how people end up in this system by barring collaboration, keeping our data safe, and restoring confidence in public programs and services."

Throughout the demonstration, speakers reminded the audience of immigrants' growing power and organizing strength. Grassroots organizing groups, including Unidad Latino en Accion, New Jersey Sanctuary Coalition, Palestinian American Community Center, and C.A.T.A. Farmworkers Association, led chants throughout the rally, and attendees were joined in a performance by The Filthy Rotten System Band.

"At P.A.C.C., we represent a group of people who have too often been unjustly displaced and scattered around the world either as refugees or documented or undocumented immigrants, with no other choice but to do so. We understand what it means to be forced out of your homes for reasons beyond your control, to start all over in a country that looks down on you just because of your race or citizenship status. We understand and have experienced the harm of globalized borders that aim to restrict and tear apart families. Everyone deserves a chance to live peacefully, with pride and respect. We must keep advocating for protections like the Values Act and freeing everyone harmed by detention and border enforcement. We have a lot more work to do internally, locally, state-wide, and nationally, and we are ready and confident that we can achieve true justice collectively," said Abire Sabbagh from Palestinian American Community Center

"Today, we stand in front of the Elizabeth Detention Center in solidarity with our community members who are detained and separated from their families because of a broken immigration system a system that profits from incarcerating immigrants because they cross a border criminalizes our people. As we get to this one-year anti-detention ban here in New Jersey, we demand to stop any more arrests and to close those existing contracts that daily detain our people. We are not money, we are human beings! said Ana Paola Pazmino from Unidad Latina en Accion NJ

"Lawmakers treat immigrant justice issues like they're radioactive, claiming that because some immigrants can't vote, that our issues aren't important. But many of New Jersey's immigrants are rapidly becoming naturalized citizens and a growing number of children live in immigrant households. Lawmakers represent more than just the people that vote for them. In a state where nearly a quarter of us are immigrants, it's time they start paying attention," said Charlene Walker of Faith in New Jersey.

As the demonstration ended, speakers reminded the crowd that federal immigration reform and deportation relief remains an unfulfilled promise since the change in administration in 2021 and that more must be done to push New Jersey's state lawmakers to take action.

"We don't know if or how the political climate will change with the midterm elections, but we do know that many of the promises made to our communities in 2020 were broken," said Laura Bustamante of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. "New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in the nation, with half of our population being made up of people of Color. If we want to change, it's on New Jersey's own legislators to make it, and we will not stop fighting until our communities see the justice, protections, and dignity we deserve."

The Values Act was introduced in late winter of 2022. The bill has 8 Senate co-sponsors and 14 Assembly co-sponsors but has yet to be heard in committee in either chamber of the legislature.

See more here:
One Year After ICE Detention Ban, Immigrants Call For Releases, Stronger Protections - RLS Media

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd and Congresswoman Kat Cammack

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. Yesterday, Congresswoman Kat Cammack brought Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council, to speak at Big Daddy Unlimited about the situation on the southwestern border. In her introduction, Cammack said polling shows that the border is one of the top three important issues to residents of her district. Cammack added, This isnt just a Texas issue; its not just an Arizona, New Mexico, California issue; this is an everyday American issue Its absurd what is happening on our own border. We have every opportunity, every means to secure that border, and yet here we are: its more porous than it ever has been.

Cammack sits on the Homeland Security Committee, which she says has full jurisdiction over the border, but Republicans are in the minority, and she said the Committee Chair, Bennie Thompson, wont pick up any legislation on the border.

Crisis has public health, humanitarian, and national security implications

Cammack highlighted the public health aspect of the large numbers of people coming across the southern border, including COVID-19, record levels of tuberculosis, and fentanyl: You have all of these drugs coming across the border, and no one on the left wants to talk about it. Yet theyre landing in our community. Were going to talk a lot about the fentanyl landing here in Gainesville today. We know for a fact that its coming from the southwest border. Cammack says that local law enforcement has seen cartel stamps on pills and bricks, and we report it back up, and just kind of crickets.

She also spoke about the humanitarian aspect of the border crisis, with women and children being trafficked and raped. She said her colleagues on the left also dont want to talk about whats happening to the children who are coming across the border.

And third, she spoke about the national security aspect, which is really one of the only fundamental roles of the federal government. But this administration has failed, majestically. Cammack said that just this year, 66 individuals on the international terror watch list have been apprehended, and that doesnt even include the got-aways that have been seen on drones or cameras but not apprehended. She added that apprehension just means released into the United States. So when you hear about 3 million-plus apprehension, thats not, Ok, we caught you, and then we turned you around. No. Thats We caught you and welcome to the United States.

Cammack also said she has documentation from FEMA that money set aside for homeless veterans and veterans at risk for homelessness was spent instead on buying bus tickets and plane tickets for illegal aliens: This is a crisis of epic proportions, and I dont care if youre Republican or Democrat or independent. This is an issue that impacts every single one of us, it impacts our community, it impacts our nation, our community, and our kids future. Thats why we all have to be all-hands-on-deck. You all have a role to play in this because whats happening at the southwest border is impacting us here.

Cammack then introduced Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council, who has served as a Border Patrol agent for 25 years. He said that whats going on at the border is not humane It is not humane that weve had 700 deaths on the border to date, in this year. Judd said the previous record was a little over 300 deaths; that record was broken last year with 500 deaths, and this year were already at 700.

96% of dangerous drugs come across the southwest border

Judd continued, We are allowing criminal cartels, organized crime, to dictate what the program, policies, and operations are on the border today. There are stretches of border that the criminal cartels literally own because they know that all they have to do is flood it with large numbers of illegal immigrants [that] causes the Border Patrol to send resources to that area and take those individuals into custody, take them back to the station to process them The cartels know thats what they need to do, and when they control those areas of the border, thats when they get their higher-value products across. Thats when the drugs come in fentanyl, by the way, we set a record in 2021 with overdose deaths here in the United Statesover 100,000 United States citizens died because of dangerous drugs. And the DEA will tell you that 96% of those drugs are coming from the southwest border.

Judd said that at any given time, 90% of Border Patrol agents are performing administrative duties; only about 10% are patrolling. He said theyve never seen large groups like the ones theyre seeing now; it used to be that a group of 100 was a massive group, but now they see groups of 500 people at a time crossing the border.

Judd: Solution is to hold people in custody, hire more temporary judges to process them

Judd said the crisis can largely be solved with policy: hire more immigration judges on a temporary basis, then hold people in custody pending their asylum or deportation proceedings, and people will stop coming. He said that the moment you start holding people in custody, and this has been proven time and time and time again, they stop coming. Judd said people dont have the money to give to the cartels, so they have to enter into indentured servitude when they arrive here to pay back the cost of passage across the border. He said, Thats not humane. Whats humane is the rule of law.

Cammack passed around wristbands that she found on the border; she said they can be found in piles there. Each wristband signifies a different cartel, and each person crossing the border gets a numbered wristband from the cartel that is providing their passage. She said, This is a reminder of the fact that the cartels do not think of people as people; they treat them like cattle.

Q&A

Cammack and Judd then took questions that the audience had submitted on index cards before the event started.

The first question was, Do Democrats want to legitimize the illegals to give them the right to vote?

Judd said that Democrats continually push comprehensive immigration reform, which would legalize the people who are already here and give them legal status after some waiting period. Yes, the Democrats do continue to push for immigration reform or an amnesty pathway to citizenship for the millions of people who are here illegally.

Cammack added that in the current Congress, one of the Democrats top priorities is a bill that lowers the voting age to 16, makes it illegal for states to enforce Voter ID, and publicly finances campaigns with a six-to-one match on small-dollar donations of $200 or less, meaning that whatever a candidate raises in that category, the federal government would give them six times that amount. She said the bill would also allow non-citizens to vote. She added, I think there is something to be said about the fact that they have pushed for doing away with Voter ID and have done away with the notion that you have to be a citizen to vote in New York City.

Cammack added, And thats all the more reason why we as conservatives have to take back the House to stop this nonsense. We can only do that if were united. That is the only way we can do it, is if we are one team, one mission, and the mission is to secure the dang border.

The second question was, As a Constitutional Conservative, at what point does the federal government failing to enforce the border violate Article IV, Section 4, shall protect against invasion?

Cammack responded, I think its already been violated I think Article IV was abandoned quite a long time ago because weve seen states like Texas that are now having to build their own border wall to protect their citizens and talk about what Arizona is dealing with at the state level.

Judd said theres a debate right now about whether the framers of the Constitution meant an invading force in that Article and what constitutes an invading force. Judd says he believes cartels are an invading force: Every single person that crosses that border illegally, every single one of them that comes across is facilitated by the cartels. He added that China is now involved in the drug trafficking because all the precursors for fentanyl come from China, then its manufactured in Mexico.

Cammack added that NORTHCOM has concluded that 40% of Mexican territory is under the control of the cartels.

Judd said the first step in fighting back against the cartels is to control illegal immigration: Remember, this is not a legal immigration debate. This is about illegal immigration. We are the most compassionate country in the world. We take in more legal immigrants than any other country, on average, per year.

Another question was, Will Republicans eliminate the 87,000 new IRS positions?

Cammack responded, Hell, yeah, were gonna get rid of the 87,000 IRS agents. They have no business being around.

The final question was, Does Republican leadership have a plan for 2023? If not, will you support someone other than [Kevin] McCarthy to be Speaker?

Cammack responded, So yes, we have a plan, and actually theres four major pillars to the plan, and actually everybodys been rolling out talking about it. There is a plan to support the securing of the border Regarding leadership, there is no one else running other than McCarthy. Jim Jordan is supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker. There are no alternatives. So there is really not much else to say on that.

Cammack added that Republicans are naturally independent thinkers and dont hang together like the Democrats. They are tough as a unit. They are one team, one mission, and thats why theyve been successful in sliding and pulling this country to the left towards socialism.

Cammack said that Republicans had an opportunity in 2017, but they had internal fighting, and we fought amongst ourselves and we lost America. We need to learn our lessons, and we need one team, one mission We have got to stop eating each other alive. Weve got to stop fighting one another If we agree on 85%, 90%, 95% of the big-ticket items, we can do some amazing things and take this country back.

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Congresswoman Kat Cammack at Every Town is a Border Town event: "The mission is to secure the dang border. - Alachua Chronicle

The Ethereum community, which is known for a sunny rainbow-and-unicorns vibe, is unusually serious as of late. Following a recent move by the U.S. Treasury Department to target a batch of crypto-related open source code, one word keeps coming up in Ethereum circles: censorship.

The concern surfaced earlier this month when the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency mixer that allows users to obfuscate transactions, and a series of Ethereum addressesbarring all Americans from interacting with both the mixer and the addresses.

According to Treasury officials, Tornado Cash has laundered over $7 billion in cryptocurrency since its creation in 2019, and has become a favorite destination for the infamous North Korean hacking outfit known as the Lazarus Group.

The Tornado Cash announcement marked a watershed moment for the crypto world. Although the Treasury has long targeted financial criminals and those who support terrorist activity, its unusual for the agency to sanction a piece of technologyin this case a mixerdirectly.

All of this set off concern within the Ethereum community about whether the blockchain is resistant to government censorshipconcern that has only increased as Ethereum approaches its highly anticipated merge upgrade next month.

Though applications existing on Ethereum can be censored, as weve seen with Tornado Cash, whether the Ethereum blockchain itself can be subject to censorship has been a topic of debate, especially with Ethereums upcoming merge.

Thats because the merge will shift Ethereum from a proof of work (PoW) consensus model to proof of stake (PoS), and, in turn, validators will have the responsibility of creating new blocks on-chain and verifying transactions, rather than miners. To become a validator, one must deposit 32 Ethera sum, currently worth around $50,000, that is intended to ensure that participants have a stake in the success of the network.

A single entity, however, can also run multiple validators, so long as the entity can afford it, and in doing so arguably garner more control. As a result, some within the Ethereum community have become concerned about the emergence of powerful, centralized entities after the mergeentities that could be pliant when it comes to carrying out government censorship requests.

Those concerned about censorship have raised various hypotheticals: Might a validator refuse to confirm a block to the Ethereum blockchain because it contains Tornado Cash transactions? Would fear of legal repercussions lead them to ignore or reject such blocks?

It is unknown whether any of this will happen, or whether the government will target validators, but such questions have been at the center of debate onlineespecially as it circulated on crypto Twitter that 66% of the Beacon Chain [or proof-of-stake chain] validators will adhere to OFAC regulations, including Coinbase and Kraken.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin weighed in on this discussion himself, and signaled his support in slashing the stake of any validators that censor the Ethereum protocol if asked by U.S. regulators.

Even Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong suggested hed rather stop the staking business of his cryptocurrency exchange than comply with any potential censorship.

Another concern post-merge involves MEVmaximal extractable value (formerly miner extractable value)and potential MEV-Boost issues, and how these could increase the potential for censorship.

MEV describes the profit a validator can earn by selecting or reordering transactions within blocks, while MEV-Boost is an optional software built for proof-of-stake Ethereum.

MEV-Boost allows validators to outsource block production to maximize their reward. Though there are upsides to MEV and MEV-Boost, both can also be used by bad actors in a malicious way. Specifically, some within the Ethereum community are worried about censorship of MEV-Boost relay operators, or entities that connect validators to block builders; the fear is that the existence of these relay operators offers a big new target for censorship.

The concern is so widespread that it was addressed during the most recent Ethereum Core Developers meeting.

If we allow censorship of user transactions on the network, then we basically failed. This is the hill that Im willing to die on, developer Marius van der Wijden said during the call. If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum then this whole thing doesnt make sense, and I will be leaving the ecosystem.

Most Ethereum developers, however, sounded hopeful that potential MEV-related issues, especially involving censorship, would not be prevalent threats, and remained focused on building Ethereum as a censorship-free protocol.

While some may take the topic more seriously than others, experts in the cryptocurrency space dont believe censorship-related fears are overblown, especially if blockchains are more widely used by normies as time goes on.

If crypto is going to go mainstreamits going to have to exist within a modern regulatory framework. That means adhering to OFAC sanctions, allowing for strong protections from money laundering, and so on, Matt Hougan, Bitwise CIO, tells Fortune. The question vis--vis ETH validators, however, is whether that adherence should occur at the foundational technological layer, or on the application and user side.

Hougan made an analogy involving the internet, asking whether libel and hate speech should be banned by the internet itself, or handled at the user and application layer instead. History suggests that freedom, innovation, and growth are best served when technologies are allowed to be credibly neutral, and we police bad acts by policing bad actors, he said.

And though the merge hasnt happened yet, weve already seen forms of censorship on Ethereum in a few ways.

Ethereum infrastructure companies Infura and Alchemy have blocked access to Tornado Cash. Circle, the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, froze Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, has also reportedly blocked Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Even Ethermine, the largest Ethereum miner, stopped processing Tornado Cash transactions, being dubbed the first hard evidence seen of censorship actually happening in block production online.

Looking ahead, only time will tell how, or if, censorship resistance is maintained.

Some online predict the decentralized finance (DeFi) space will continue to split into two: one being a regulated, compliant version of DeFi, and the other being badlands DeFi, as Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, wrote on Twitter. Most blue-chip projects will embrace the former.

To Hougan, an interesting part of this process is that the Ethereum community is determining through discussion how important decentralization is as a core value. Different blockchains will decide on different answers to this question, and it will be interesting to see which answer the market rewards and punishes.

Until then, the debate surrounding censorship on Ethereum is likely to get louder.

The rest is here:
The Ethereum community is worried about censorship as the merge approaches. Heres why - Fortune

Elon Musk is back in the headlines this week. The founder and CEO of Tesla contributed a piece to China Cyberspace, the official publication of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the government's cyber censorship arm. It's a big deal, and proof of how deeply entangled Musk is with a regime hostile to free speech, and to the human rights of its people more broadly.

Worse, Musk's closeness with the Cyberspace Administration of China raises important questions about whether Musk, who has a Giga factory in China and has taken over $1 billion in loans from the country, has fallen prey to China's Military Civil Fusion disclosure laws. And the stakes are high: Is Musk supplying China with classified information he gains by working with the U.S. space program and other national security-sensitive projects?

Not only does the Cyberspace Administration of China control and often choke the flow of information into and out of the country, but it also provides data security for Tencent, a giant logistics conglomerate controlled by the Communist Party of China that owns 5 percent of Tesla.

The scale of Musk's operations in China makes him vulnerable to intimidation by its communist leadership, and should make us wary of his pending deal to buy Twitter. Do we really want Twitter's owner to be someone entangled substantially with one of the most repressive governments on earth, one with a long history of forcing private companies to serve its interests?

Twitter is banned in China, along with many other media companies that don't toe the party line. But some Chinese dissidents do manage to use the platform inside the country, as do many outside the country to coordinate resistance. While Musk initially claimed to be a free speech absolutist, on April 27, he clarified that he would comply with the government laws that restrict free speech.

Of course, Musk is far from the only tech magnate who has raised concerns. Amazon has catered even more directly to the censorship needs of the Communist Party of China, like when it partnered with a propaganda arm of the government to market a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings published on a Chinese website in 2020. When Amazon customers began to publish unflattering reviews of the collection, the Chinese government ordered the reviews removed and the comment feature disabled for not just this but all products sold in China.

Moreover, the CCP has partnered with Amazon on a project known as China Books, which offers 90,000 Chinese books for sale but generates little revenue. The project is widely seen as a sop to keep the government happy so Amazon can function. The company stated in an internal document back in 2018 that "ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the Communist Party to achieve and maintain its success. We are not making judgment on whether it is right or wrong."

Meanwhile, Google is working on a China-only search engine that will black out websites and search terms the government considers threateninglike those pertaining to human rights, democracy and religion.

And Twitter has worked with the Chinese Communist Party to whitewash the abuse of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government. According to reports, Twitter promoted more than 50 tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state-run media outfit, that deliberately mislead users on how the Uyghurs are treated in the detention camps in which they're forced to live.

Every day, we see stories of corporations making the choice to participate in everything from censorship to masking drastic human rights violations, in order to retain access to China's lucrative market of 1.3 billion people.

Fortunately, the days of this problem being ignored are ending. Already Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) are working to learn more and perhaps develop legislation to guide these exchanges.

Stewart wants hearings to determine exactly what confidential information may fall into China's hands as a result of Big Tech's cowardly capitulation, and Rubio is interested in reforming contracting procedures to make sure we're not going into business with Chinese Communist Party-aligned businesses.

A variety of approaches are possible. But one thing is clear: It is past time we learn more about what it means for an American corporation to do business in sensitive industries in China. We may be shocked at what we find.

Jianli Yang is founder and president ofCitizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of For Us, the Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

The rest is here:
Big Tech Is Fully Cooperating With China's Censorship Regime. It's Got to Stop | Opinion - Newsweek

Largest US Exchange Accounts For 14% Of All Staked ETH

After several days of mounting pressure, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said that he would rather shut down the companys Ethereum staking service than comply with a government order to censor sanctioned transactions.

Its a hypothetical we hopefully wont actually face. But if we did wed go with B i think, Armstrong tweeted in response to Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas, who had asked Coinbase and its peers whether they would censor or leave the staking business if pressured by regulators.

Got to focus on the bigger picture. There may be some better option (C) or a legal challenge as well that could help reach a better outcome, Armstrong continued.

Coinbase accounts for about 14% of all staked Ether, with more than 1.9M ETH locked on behalf of its users in the networks Beacon chain. Ether is trading at $1,850 on Wednesday evening in New York, making Coinbases stake worth more than $3.5B.

The sanctions levied on Tornado Cash and the subsequent arrest of a developer who contributed to its code have kicked off an existential debate within the Ethereum community. And prominent members are demanding that billion-dollar players like Coinbase take sides.

You had one jobONE JOB: censorship resistance, Lane Rettig, a former Ethereum core developer, wrote on Twitter, addressing the Ethereum community. Its the ONE THING that makes all the pain worthwhile: all the obnoxious, slow, painful decentralization theater. If you cant do that one thing, then theres no point in any of this and we should all pack up and go home already.

Four entities Lido, Coinbase, Kraken and Binance control about 60% of the Ether used to secure Ethereums Beacon Chain, the proof-of-stake consensus layer running in parallel with Ethereums current proof-of-work chain. When the two merge a long-anticipated event currently scheduled for mid-September the Beacon Chain will effectively absorb the proof-of-work chain, reducing Ethereums energy use by over 99%.

But it will also give major staking entities the power to, in theory, reject certain transactions.

That once far-fetched hypothetical scenario now seems all too real, after the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Tornado Cash protocol and some four dozen affiliated crypto wallets on the grounds that they facilitated money laundering by state-sponsored North Korean hackers and other cybercriminals.

Earlier this week, Karapetsas posed a question to Lido, Coinbase and other major stakers. If regulators demand they censor Ethereum transactions, would they [A] comply? Or would they [B] exit the staking business to preserve network integrity, forfeiting billions of dollars in the process?

If any of them choose [to comply] we should actively strive to move away from them as they are an existential threat to the permissionless nature of the network, he wrote in a subsequent tweet.

The question has sparked a heated, multifaceted debate Would regulators really do that? Could they? What would Lido, Coinbase and other staking entities have to do in order to comply? And, perhaps most importantly: if they did comply, how could the community fight back?

Crypto attorney Geoff Costeloe said centralized staking entities would have no choice but to comply with government censorship orders.

These arent individuals. They are entities with shareholders and an obligation to profit, he tweeted. Only if A was less profitable than B (or similar) would it be a real question.

Luke Youngblood, a developer at DeFi protocol Moonwell who formerly worked on Coinbases ETH staking offering, disputed the claim.

One thing you might not know is that all of Coinbase retail Ethereum validators operate outside the US (for tax purposes). So not only will they fight censorship to their last, dying breath, it is a stretch for US regulators to censor transactions.

In the event Coinbase and company do comply, however, the Ethereum community would be left with little recourse other than a user activated soft fork, or USAF, according to observers.

Such a move would eliminate the stake of any entity that systematically engages in baselayer censorship to comply with government regulation, according to Twitter personality and self-described bitcoiner Eric Wall.

In a series of threads serving as a call to action, Wall is urging his followers to pressure large stakes to take a stand against censorship.

Blake West, the co-founder of Goldfinch, believes that Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, effectively has veto power over Ethereum, given USDCs importance in the ecosystem. To illustrate his point, he cites an attempt by some to keep Ethereums proof-of-work chain alive after The Merge.

Miners, the operators who contribute vast amounts of computing power to secure Ethereum today, will find their expensive equipment useless after the Merge and have pledged to fork the network in other words, to copy and paste Ethereum as it exists today and continue operating it as though nothing has changed.

West believes this effort will prove futile.

When the [proof-of-work] fork goes live, the supply of USDC will on-chain at least immediately double, he wrote. But of course, the dollars in Circles bank account will not. Thus Circle must choose one and only one chain. They chose Proof of Stake. And that alone kills the PoW fork. b/c the on-chain state becomes chaos if USDC value immediately drops to zero.

Blockworks research analyst Matt Fiebach believes this could doom an anti-censorship USAF.

Will Circle (USDC) support the censored chain or the not censored one? he mused on Twitter. If they choose the censored one (as is likely), well, we might be screwed my permissionless-supporting friends.

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Coinbase CEO: Would Exit Staking Biz If Forced To Censor Transactions - The Defiant - DeFi News