Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev sentenced to 64 months in prison

Alexey Pertsev, the developer of Ethereum-based cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, was sentenced to 64 months in prison after being found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch court on Tuesday.

The judge said the platform was “targeted at criminals” and that Pertsev should have suspected the criminal origins of the transactions.

The closely watched incident was a major blow to financial privacy advocates. Many critics argue that Pertsev is being unfairly targeted as an open source platform developer.

He also said he has no control over how users use Tornado Cash to obfuscate their transaction history on the public blockchain.

Nonetheless, prosecutors successfully argued that Pertsev did too little to prevent the mixer from being used for money laundering.

They rejected claims that his duties were diminished due to the decentralized nature of the platform’s operations.

Experts predict that this will have a chilling effect on the development of open source tools that enable anonymity on Bitcoin and other blockchains. They claim it sets a precedent for holding developers accountable for the actions of anonymous users.

Tornado Cache was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2022 for allegedly concealing funds stolen by North Korean state hackers. Pertsev was arrested a few days later, dealing a major blow to the nascent cryptocurrency privacy sector.