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Vitalik Buterin previously contributed 50 Ether to the legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers.
Key Takeaways
The Ethereum Foundation donated $1.25 million to support Alexey Pertsev's legal defense. Vitalik Buterin contributed 50 ETH to the legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers. <?xml encoding="UTF-8"?>The Ethereum Foundation announced today a $1.25 million donation to support the legal defense of Alexey Pertsev, stating that “Privacy is normal, and writing code is not a crime.”
The EF is donating $1.25M to the legal defense of Alexey Pertsev.
Privacy is normal, and writing code is not a crime.
You can contribute to @alex_pertsev's defense here: https://t.co/shWFNoDJ9g https://t.co/ITvEiRkAGt
— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) February 26, 2025
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously contributed 50 ETH, worth approximately $170,000, to a legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev through the Juicebox project Free Pertsev and Storm.
Storm indicated the contribution represented about 25% of the $650,000 available through JusticeDAO ahead of his trial.
Pertsev was arrested by Dutch authorities in 2022 for his involvement in the crypto mixing service. In May 2024, he was found guilty of money laundering and received a prison sentence exceeding five years. He plans to appeal the verdict.
US prosecutors later charged Storm and Roman Semenov with money laundering, sanctions violations and fraud related to their roles with Tornado Cash. Storm was granted bail before his trial, scheduled for April 14, while Semenov remains at large.
The charges followed the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control adding the mixer to its Specially Designated Nationals list in August 2022. US officials claimed bad actors, including North Korean hackers, had used Tornado Cash to launder over $7 billion worth of crypto assets since 2019.
Buterin previously donated 100 ETH to Free Pertsev and Storm Juicebox in October. A similar fundraising effort on GoFundMe was shut down in February.
The US Treasury Department currently faces two lawsuits: one from crypto advocacy group Coin Center and another from Tornado Cash users backed by Coinbase. In November, an appellate court ruled the Treasury had “overstepped” in sanctioning the crypto mixer’s immutable smart contracts, though this ruling has not affected Storm’s criminal case.
Earlier this month, Alexey Pertsev was conditionally released from pretrial detention and placed under electronic monitoring to prepare his defense against money laundering charges related to his work with Tornado Cash.
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