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.

“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.

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.