The developer of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, Aleksey Pertsev, who is being held in a Dutch prison, will not be able to be released on bail. This is reported CoinDesk.
The panel of judges agreed that the Russian could escape or try to hide the evidence if he was released.
According to the position of the prosecutor’s office, Pertsev and his colleagues did not just publish the code, but ran Tornado Cash like a business. The agency compared them to bank employees who accepted large amounts of suspicious funds without question.
Pertsev denied the allegations against him. The next hearing in the case will take place at the end of April.
The lawyer of the Russian Keith Cheng, in a comment to CoinDesk, said that it was the lack of knowledge of judges about decentralized finance that did not allow his client to go free.
“We had the opportunity to explain what underlies Tornado Cash and why it is not money laundering,” he said.
As a reminder, August 8, 2022 OFAC placed Tornado Cash on the sanctions list on suspicion of laundering over $7 billion in cryptocurrencies. The services of the service were used, among other things, by the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.
Chainalysis estimates that more than $3.5 billion has passed through Tornado Cash since its inception, of which up to $1.2 billion is directly related to theft, hacking, and other illegal operations.
On August 12, Dutch authorities arrested Alexey Pertsev, the developer of the service. He is suspected of involvement in money laundering and concealment of criminal financial flows. The last time his detention was extended until 20 February.
A rally was held in Amsterdam in support of Pertsev. The participants stated that open source is not a crime and that the authorities should prosecute the real perpetrators.
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