Vitalik Buterin donated 170 thousand dollars to the legal fund of Tornado Cash developers
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has made a large contribution to the legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Persev.
According to a Dec. 31 post from Juicebox Project Free Perceive and Storm, Buterin donated 50 Ether (ETH) — roughly $170,000 at the time of publication — to Storm and Perceive.
Tornado reported that before the trial, Tornado Cash was about 25% of the total $650,000 available to the developer through JustDAO.
A donation of 50 ETH from Vitalik Buterin. Source: Free Pertsev and Storm
In the year In 2022, Dutch authorities arrested and charged Perseve for his involvement in a cryptocurrency mixing service. In May 2024, he was found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to more than five years in prison, although Percev appealed the sentence.
US prosecutors later charged Storm and his partner Roman Semenov with money laundering, sanctions violations and embezzlement in connection with Tornado Cash.
Storm was granted bail conditions ahead of the trial, which was scheduled to begin on April 14, and Semenov was in custody at the time of going to press.
Related: Vitalik Buterin welcomes Moo Deng with 88 ETH zoo donation.
Most of the criminal charges against Tornado organizers appear to stem from the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control adding the bomber to a list of specially designated nationals in August 2022. It had bad actors, including North Korean hackers, US officials said at the time. As of 2019, Tornado Cash has been used to launder over seven billion dollars worth of crypto.
A legitimate outcry from crypto users
The ban on the mixer and the criminal charges against the developers have angered many in the crypto industry.
Buterin donated 100 ETH — roughly $240,000 — to Free Perceive and Storm Juicebox in October, but GoFundMe shut down a similar fundraising effort in February.
The US Treasury Department is facing two lawsuits against the cryptocurrency advocacy group Coin Center and a group of Tornado Cash users backed by Coinbase.
An appeals court said in November that the Treasury Department had “overreached” in approving the crypto-minor's immutable smart contracts, but the ruling does not appear to have affected the criminal case against Storm.
Magazine: Will ETH outperform BTC in January? IRS DeFi Broker Rules and More: Hodler's Digest, December 22 – 28
