The crypto community has banded together in support of the creators of the former crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, who are facing charges of money laundering, sanctions violations, and running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. One of the individuals has already been convicted and sentenced to jail.
In response to the arrests of Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm and developer Alexey Pertsev, the crypto community has established JusticeDAO, a group dedicated to raising funds for the legal defense of the arrested individuals.
Through a fundraiser called “Free Alexey & Roman” on the decentralized platform Juicebox, the group has managed to raise over 654 Ether (ETH), equivalent to $2.3 million at the time of publishing. Additionally, 70 ETH was raised via the JusticeDAO page.
Juicebox has released a publicly available spreadsheet detailing the expenditures of the Free Alexey & Roman fund. The fund has already spent $1.39 million on legal fees between December 2023 and May 2024. It is anticipated that an additional $2.8 million will be spent in the next five months, along with $400,000 for expert research and additional legal fees, bringing the total fees for 2024 to an estimated $3.35 million.
Notable contributions to the fund have been made by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, a privacy advocate known for his work on enhancing privacy within the Ethereum network.
Members of the crypto community argue that creating tools to safeguard financial privacy, such as a crypto mixer, is not a criminal act, although regulators have a different perspective.
Despite the support from the crypto community, the founders of Tornado Cash still face serious charges.
In 2022, the United States Treasury Department claimed that Tornado Cash had been used by criminals to launder over $7 billion in crypto assets over a three-year period. Storm and Roman Semenov, the co-founders of the platform, were subsequently accused of money laundering and sanctions violations in August 2023. Storm was arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, while Semenov was placed on the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list.
Storm is currently facing three charges: conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Recently, Storm’s legal team filed an appeal to dismiss the money laundering charges, arguing that they are flawed and should be dropped, as Storm cannot control or prevent sanctioned entities from using the crypto mixer. They maintain that Tornado Cash was developed and made publicly available before sanctioned hackers had the opportunity to utilize it.
In May 2024, a Dutch court found Tornado Cash developer Pertsev guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to five years and four months in prison for allegedly laundering $1.2 billion worth of illicit assets on the platform.
The case has sparked a debate about the legal responsibility of developers for the end-use of the tools they create. Legal experts believe that the outcome of Storm’s trial will have significant implications for the crypto industry, particularly for privacy-focused services. The prosecution of Pertsev in the Netherlands is expected to put pressure on developers working on similar projects in the future.