Alexey Pertsev, developer of Ethereum-based crypto mixer tornado cachewas found guilty of money laundering charges by a Dutch court on Tuesday and sentenced to 64 months in prison.
The judge said the platform was “targeted at criminals” and Pertsev should have questioned the criminal origins of the transactions.
The case has garnered attention and is a major blow to financial privacy advocates. Many critics argue that Mr. Pertsev is being unfairly targeted as a developer of an open source platform.
Additionally, he said he had no control over how users employed Tornado Cash to hide their transaction history on the public blockchain.
Nevertheless, prosecutors successfully argued that Mr. Pertsev took insufficient steps to prevent the mixer from being used for money laundering.
They rejected arguments that his obligations were reduced because the platform’s operations were decentralized.
Experts predict it will have a chilling effect on the development of open source tools that enable anonymity for Bitcoin and other blockchains. They argue that this sets a precedent for holding developers accountable for the actions of anonymous users.
Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2022 for allegedly concealing funds stolen by North Korean state hackers. Pertsev was arrested days later, dealing a major blow to the nascent cryptocurrency privacy field.
