Tornado Cash Dev Alexey Pertsev Gets $1 Million Donation From Ethereum Foundation

The EthereumEthereum Foundation has said it will donate $1.25 million to help Tornado Cash main developer Alexey Pertsev's legal defense.

In a Wednesday post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the non-profit said that writing code was "not a crime," and posted a link for those wanting to add donations.

Pertsev is one of the main developers behind the Tornado Cash app, a coin mixer the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in 2022 because they said criminals were using it to launder cash.

In 2022, Dutch feds arrested Netherlands-based Pertsev and hit the Russian national with money laundering charges.

A Dutch judge at s-Hertogenbosch court last year ruled that Tornado Cash was "intended for criminals," and a jury convicted Pertsev of laundering $1.2 billion in illicit assets. He was sentenced to 64 months in prison.

Pertsev has since been released under house arrest as he waits to appeal his sentence.

Tornado Cash Developer Alexey Pertsev Leaving Prison on Supervised Release

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev will be released from prison on Friday, ending his pretrial detention ahead of his attempt to appeal his conviction last year on money laundering charges. The Netherlands resident, who has been in detention since 2022, is in the process of appealing his conviction on money laundering charges in connection with his work on developing Tornado Cash, a coin-mixing service used to mask the flow of Ethereum transactions. A Dutch court handed down a 64-month prison...

"Privacy is normal, and writing code is not a crime," the Foundation said on X (formerly Twitter).

Tornado Cash allowed users to anonymously send and receive ETH, the second-largest cryptocurrency. But North Korean-sponsored actors used the app to cover their tracks after hacking crypto protocols, according to American feds.

The Tornado Cash case is controversial among privacy advocates—including U.S. politicians—who have argued that sanctioning the app is an attack on civil liberties.

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America's biggest crypto exchange, publicly-traded Coinbase, funded a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Treasury, calling its sanctioning of the Ethereum mixing service an "unprecedented, overbroad action."

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports all things Ethereum, the network behind ETH. The org supports the developers working on the blockchain, and gives grants to those building Ethereum-based projects.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.