Vitalik Buterin donated $120 000 to Tornado Cash developers for lawyers

The funds in ETH are directed to a fund on the Juicebox platform

30.05.2024 - 13:20

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2 min

What’s new? Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin has donated funds for the legal defense of the developers of the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, which is on the US sanctions list for August 2022. Buterin sent 30 ETH coins worth $120 890 at the current Binance exchange rate.

Details of the transaction in the Etherscan explorer

What else is known? The developer sent funds from his publicly known address vitalik.eth to a special fund created on the decentralized fundraising crypto platform Juicebox to pay lawyers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm.

Pertsev, who has been under arrest in the Netherlands since August 2022, was sentenced this month to 64 months in prison for laundering $1,2 billion. The court said the developer knew of the criminal origin of the funds flowing into the service. Pertsev appealed his conviction by filing an appeal with the court in the city of Hertogenbosch.

Storm was arrested in the United States a year later, in August 2023, and later released on bail. Storm, along with his fellow Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov, was also accused of laundering $1 billion in criminal funds linked to North Korean hackers, among others. Storm’s sentence has not yet been announced, with the trial set to begin in September. Semenov remains at large.