The crypto community has gathered to support the developers of the now-defunct crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, who are facing charges of money laundering, sanctions violations, and running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. One of the developers has already been convicted and sentenced to jail.
After the arrests of Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm and developer Alexey Pertsev, the crypto community has united to form JusticeDAO, an advocacy group aimed at 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 raised more than 654 Ether (ETH), equivalent to $2.3 million at the time of publication. Additionally, the fund received 70 ETH via the JusticeDAO page.
Juicebox has released a publicly available spreadsheet tracking the expenses 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 projected to spend an additional $2.8 million in the next five months and an extra $400,000 on expert research and legal fees, bringing the total fees for 2024 to nearly $3.35 million.
Notable contributions to the fund have come from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, a privacy advocate who has published various papers and recommendations on enhancing privacy on Ethereum.
Despite the support from the crypto community, the founders of Tornado Cash are facing serious charges.
In 2022, the United States Treasury Department accused notorious criminals of using Tornado Cash to launder over $7 billion in crypto assets over a three-year period. A year later, in August 2023, the platform’s co-founders, Storm and Roman Semenov, were charged with money laundering and sanctions violations. 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 faces 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 fundamentally flawed and should be dropped since Storm cannot control or prevent sanctioned entities from using the crypto mixer.
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. The outcome of Storm’s upcoming trial is expected to have significant implications for the crypto industry, particularly for privacy-focused services, and may put unprecedented pressure on developers working on similar projects in the future.