A Dutch court has ruled that the arrested Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev must remain in pre-trial detention for another 90 days. The crypto community criticizes this decision and is demonstrating in parts on the spot against the verdict.
Crypto investor Ryan Adams argues that the developer actually did something good for the public by writing the programming code for Tornado Cash. Only because “a few bad guys” have misused the code of Pertsev for their purposes, he would now have to bear the consequences.
Crypto entrepreneur Jill Gunter, in turn, believes that the Pertsev case is not getting enough media attention yet. In addition, the actual allegations would be confused and unclear, which is why she calls the situation as a whole “scary”.
Therefore, parts of the regional crypto community have now gathered in Amsterdam to demonstrate for the release of the developer. Under the slogan “Open source is not a crime”, the demonstrators point out that writing publicly accessible programming code should not be interpreted as a crime. Rather, those who abuse the code should be held accountable.
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– sudo rm -rf –no-preserve-root / (@pcaversaccio) August 20, 2022
Cryptography lecturer Matthew Green also criticizes the Dutch police for the arrest of Pertsev. Green states that he does not understand why Pertsev was detained in the first place, and the police authorities probably would not understand this either.
On August 12, the developer was arrested in the Netherlands, where he is accused of having facilitated money laundering through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. According to the authorities, the traces of massive sums of money through the service, which came from illegal transactions, crypto scams and hacker attacks, would have been blurred.
At the beginning of August, the US Treasury Department had initially imposed sanctions on some wallet addresses associated with Tornado Cash. In addition, American citizens were prohibited from continuing to use the crypto mixer. In the course of this, crypto assets were frozen in the form of USD Coin (USDC) and Ethereum (ETH), which are located in some of the sanctioned wallets.
