Tornado Cash: Co-Founder Roman Storm Prepares For Legal Battle, Mobilizes The PriFi Community
If you are into cryptocurrencies, the Tornado Cash case should be of interest for you, as it will be a landmark case not just for the Open Source developer community, but also specifically for privacy-enhanced blockchain solutions such as crypto mixers and privacy coins.
Tornado Cash is such a ‘crypto mixer’ that uses smart contracts and zK-proofs in order to facilitate ETH deposits before creating withdrawals to multiple other addresses which are made from the liquidity pools of this protocol. This way, the original sender remains anonymous.
In August 2022, Alexey Pertsev (Co-Founder of Tornado Cash) was arrested by Dutch authorities, shortly after the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the mixer and participating addresses.
One year later, in August 2023, the other Co-Founders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, were charged with operating Tornado Cash and laundering more than $1 Billion in criminal proceeds.
Now they face the legal proceedings - and the result will be very important, for all of us. Publishing open source code is not a crime!
Before we continue, here my previous articles related to those events, in case you need to catch up:
Roman Storm Mobilizes PriFi Community
Yesterday, Roman Storm posted a video on X, telling us what happened to him and that he needs help, asking for donations for his legal defense. So far, almost 60 ETH (=$133,000) were raised, including a 12 ETH donation from Vitalik Buterin.
I really hope that more donations are yet to come. They all certainly deserve our support. Their work and the upcoming legal proceedings will shape the space of privacy-enhanced solutions, as this case will be used as precedent in the future.
We Have To Fight For Our Freedom - NOW!
Freedoms are not given; they are won. In order to maintain fundamental human rights, such as privacy, people have to come together and fight back; to develop new technologies, to focus on decentralization, in order to let people exercise their right of privacy!
If you think the same way, you should follow the Private Finance Syndicate!