Ethereum Foundation to donate $1.25 in support of Alexey Pertsev legal defense

The Ethereum Foundation will donate $1.25 to aid the legal battle of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced a donation of $1.25 million to support the legal defense of Alexey Pertsev, a developer of Tornado Cash. Pertsev, who had been on pretrial detention since August 2022, was released on Feb. 7 and is currently under house arrest while preparing his legal appeal. His pretrial detention was suspended by a Dutch court on Feb. 6, following an earlier decision in Nov. 2024 to extend his detention.

In May 2024, Pertsev was found guilty of money laundering by the ‘s-Hertogenbosch Court of Appeal and was sentenced to 64 months in prison. The court’s ruling was made despite the fact that Pertsev and his colleagues did not control the funds that passed through Tornado Cash, nor the protocol itself.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had sanctioned Tornado Cash in 2022, citing that over $7 billion in illicit funds had been laundered through the platform since its inception in 2019. OFAC also pointed to $455 million in stolen funds allegedly laundered by the North Korean hacking group Lazarus as part of its justification. However, a U.S. court ruled that the Treasury overstepped its authority in sanctioning some of Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts.

Pertsev’s prosecution has drawn significant criticism. Notably, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed concerns about the case in 2024. “The Alexey thing is definitely really unfortunate,” he said at a Berlin conference in 2024. “I think a lot of people have been going under the assumption […] that just building software is something that’s okay and is a totally legal and legit way to fight for privacy.”

Meanwhile, Tornado Cash co-founder, Roman Storm, is facing legal action in Manhattan on charges of facilitating money laundering through Tornado Cash. A New York court recently denied his motion to dismiss the charges, and several organizations, including venture capital firm Paradigm have supported Storm’s defense by committing donations to aid in his legal battle.

Tornado Cash is a crypto mixing service used for obfuscating the origin and destination of transactions. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, it allows users to deposit ETH or ERC-20 tokens into a smart contract and later withdraw them to a different address, which effectively breaks the link between the sender and receiver. Tornado cash was recently used to obfuscate transaction destinations in the Infini hack. The funds stolen in January’s multi-million hack of the Phemex exchange also reportedly used Tornado Cash.