Cardano founder supports Tornado Cash developers

What’s new? The founder of the Cardano network Charles Hoskinson released a video in which he expressed support for the developers of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer. He also criticized the US government’s decision to put the mixer on the sanctions list because it was being used by criminals to launder money. Hoskinson noted that developers can write open source code but they cannot control how people will use it, so banning the service is “an extremely dangerous precedent.”

Charles Hoskinson’s video

What else did Hoskinson add? The Cardano founder also compared writing a code to “how you make cyanide” or “how you build a bomb.” He added that it is up to people to decide how to use such information, even if for illegal purposes:

“They [developers] just wrote the code that could technically be used this way.”

According to Hoskinson, if one follows the logic of the authorities, the developers of the Linux operating system are indirectly “contributing to the nuclear weapons program of North Korea,” since anyone can use their code for various purposes.

On August 20 in Amsterdam, more than 50 people rallied against the arrest of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev. He was detained by the Dutch authorities on August 10 on suspicion of involvement in money laundering and concealing financial flows through Tornado Cash. According to authorities, the mixer was used to launder cryptocurrencies stolen through hacks.

Commenting on the situation, Stefan George, the co-founder of Gnosis Chain, an Ethereum sidechain, said that writing open-source software should be recognized as “an expression of free speech.” Uniswap protocol founder Hayden Adams criticized the banning of the entire service because of the actions of individual attackers and called the precedent a threat to freedom of speech and privacy. The developers of Zcash also noted that this precedent could negatively affect the civil liberties of Americans.

For more details on what awaits DeFi projects after the sanctions against crypto mixer, see GetBlock Magazine’s editorial.