Ethereum Foundation Pledges $1.25M to Back Tornado Cash Developer’s Legal Fight

The Ethereum Foundation is stepping up with a $1.25 million donation to help fund the legal defense of Alexey Pertsev, a key figure behind Tornado Cash. Pertsev’s been in the hot seat since his arrest in August 2022, spending months in pretrial detention in the Netherlands.

He finally caught a break on February 7, 2025, when a Dutch court let him out on house arrest after suspending his detention the day prior. Now, he’s gearing up for an appeal following a May 2024 guilty verdict from the ‘s-Hertogenbosch Court of Appeal, which slapped him with a 64-month prison sentence for money laundering—even though he and his team didn’t control Tornado Cash’s funds or its protocol.

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

The whole mess traces back to 2022 when the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, claiming it had funneled over $7 billion in dirty money since 2019, including $455 million tied to North Korea’s Lazarus hacking crew. But that sanction hit a snag when a U.S. court later ruled OFAC overreached by targeting Tornado’s unchangeable smart contracts.

Pertsev’s case has sparked a firestorm. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin didn’t hold back at a 2024 Berlin conference, calling it “really unfortunate” and questioning why building privacy-focused software should land someone in jail. “A lot of people assumed that just coding is a legit way to push for privacy,” he said. Across the pond, Pertsev’s Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm is battling his own legal woes in Manhattan, facing money laundering charges. A New York court recently shot down his bid to dismiss the case, but he’s got backing from heavyweights like Paradigm, who’ve chipped in to fund his defense.

Paradigm will be donating $1.25M to help fund Roman Storm’s legal defense

The prosecution’s case threatens to hold software developers criminally liable for the bad acts of third parties, which would have a chilling effect in crypto and beyond

We must stand with @rstormsf https://t.co/OvPHNYeGFD

— Matt Huang (@matthuang) January 28, 2025

For the uninitiated, Tornado Cash is a crypto mixing tool on Ethereum that scrambles transaction trails—users toss in ETH or ERC-20 tokens, and the smart contract spits them out to a new address, masking who sent what. It’s been a go-to for crooks lately, popping up in January’s multi-million-dollar Phemex exchange hack and the Infini heist to hide stolen loot. Still, the Ethereum Foundation’s hefty donation signals loud support for Pertsev, framing his fight as a bigger battle over crypto’s future and the right to code.