Arbitrum community offers to fund Tornado Cash’s legal defense

The Arbitrum blockchain community initiated a vote on a proposal to fund the legal defense of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer team.

The vote began on March 8 in the Arbitrum community. The proposal offered to help Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm and developer Alexey Pertsev financially.

The proposal states that Tornado Cash is a beacon of privacy and security in the crypto industry, providing users with a secure way to conduct private transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

“No one shall be subject to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

Arbitrum community

This initiative’s purpose is twofold: to provide strong legal protections for both individuals and to protect developers’ rights to contribute to the deployment of unauthorized open-source software.

With the support of its legal foundation, the goal is to protect the future of privacy-preserving technologies while also protecting the broader principles of the crypto industry, such as innovation, decentralization, and individual sovereignty.

Tornado Cash’s previous fundraising efforts, legal troubles

In February, crowdfunding platform GoFundMe canceled its fundraiser to cover legal costs in the Tornado Cash case. GoFundMe cited a violation of its terms of service, which prohibits fundraising if it could expose the platform, its employees, or users to any harm or create liability for them. A total of $30,000 was sent to support the mixer on GoFundMe, with all contributed assets eventually being returned to donors.

In August 2022, the mixer appeared on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list. The reason for the blocking was the use of Tornado Cash for money laundering. According to U.S. authorities, attackers have laundered more than $7 billion through the mixer since its creation. Hackers of the North Korean group Lazarus actively used the mixer.

Pertsev was arrested in Amsterdam on Aug. 12, 2022, and is suspected of laundering criminal proceeds using Tornado Cash.