Vitalik Buterin has continued supporting Tornado Cash’s developers, Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm, who have been arrested on money laundering charges.
The Ethereum co-founder has contributed thirty Ethereum worth one hundred and eleven thousand dollars to the Juicebox campaign “Free Alexey & Roman” to support the Tornado Cash developers.
Buterin’s advocacy and legal support for Tornado Cash devs
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared his concern with the recently made decision regarding Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm. In an interview at the DappCon event in Berlin, Buterin said regarding the 64-month prison sentence given to Pertsev, “It is really unfortunate.”
A legal fund has raised 591 ETH, approximately $2. 2 million, to support the creators of the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency laundering service Tornado Cash.
Pertsev was convicted by Dutch courts to a year imprisonment for handling $1. The convicted launderer, found to have laundered over $2 billion through Tornado Cash from July 2019 to August 2022, has further challenged his conviction to the Court of Appeal of s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands.
Roman Storm has been in U.S. custody since his apprehension in 2023, and his trial is expected to commence in September. On March 3, 2022, Buterin publicly supported legal causes by donating 10 ETH, equivalent to $30,980, towards AssangeDAO, a legal fund for the detained WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Vitalik Buterin’s $300K Ethereum transfer: Report
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has previously been seen as supporting privacy and anonymous transactions. Before the recent support, he had sent 80 ETH worth around $300,000 to Railgun, a privacy-focused coin mixer, to support these principles.
Last but not least, on the 27th of April, Buterin discussed the problem of centralization in the Ether network. He agreed that the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm, which was used by Ethereum, has a big impact on centralization, and these issues were not considered enough. Buterin shared a roadmap detailing the changes to the staking mechanisms and new ways of incentivising more people to become validators to reduce centralization.