Tornado Cash developer to be placed under house arrest. TORN reacts with an increase of 26%

Starting April 26, Alexey Pertsev will be able to wait at home for the next hearing on the case

20.04.2023 - 13:55

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What’s new? On April 20, the rate of the native token of the crypto mixer Tornado Cash (TORN) added 26% overnight and reached $10,96. The growth occurred amid news that the Dutch authorities will transfer the service’s developer Alexey Pertsev under house arrest. A blockchain developer under the nickname banteg reported this on Twitter with reference to Eléonore Blanc, the organizer of rallies in support of Pertsev. According to her, Pertsev will be released from prison on April 26. As of 13:40 UTC, TORN has corrected to $9,87, according to aggregator CoinGecko.

tornado cash dev alex pertsev reportedly released just now pic.twitter.com/Lg1s01VaRP— banteg (@bantg) April 20, 2023

What else is known? According to Blanc, the next court hearing in the Tornado Cash money laundering case will take place on May 24, until which date Pertsev will be allowed to remain under home arrest with an ankle monitor and restrictions on physical movement. Yet in February, Pertsev was denied bail because of concerns that he might flee or conceal important evidence.

Tornado Cash situation. On August 8, 2022, the US Treasury Department put Tornado Cash on its sanctions list. According to the authorities, the service was used by North Korean hackers from the Lazarus group, and they later linked the mixer to the DPRK’s nuclear program. A few days after the restrictions were imposed, Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of involvement in money laundering through the mixer.

After Pertsev’s arrest, many representatives of the crypto industry came out in his defense. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, for example, argued that programmers have no control over how people use the open-source code they wrote.

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