In the conclusion of that same statement to the court, they point out that under Dutch law the maximum prison sentence for money laundering on the scale that Pertsev allegedly committed is eight years, and ask that Pertsev be sentenced to five years and four months. if found guilty.
The tornado advances
Cryptocurrency advocates focused on privacy and civil liberties will closely follow the outcome of the Pertsev case, which many see as an indicator of how Western authorities and regulators will draw the line between financial privacy and money laundering, even in some immediate cases that will follow.
More likely is Storm’s US trial of Tornado Cash in a New York court later this year, as well as the US indictment last month of the founders of Samourai Wallet, which prosecutors said offered privacy properties similar to of Tornado Cash, directly set precedents in American law. But the Pertsev case may suggest the direction those cases will take, says Alex Gladstein, director of strategy at the Human Rights Foundation and an advocate for using Bitcoin as a human rights tool.
“What happens in the Netherlands will influence the New York case, and the Tornado Cash cases will really influence the outcome of the Samourai case,” Gladstein says. “These cases are going to be historic because of the precedents they set.”
Gladstein, like many crypto-privacy supporters, argues that anyone weighing the value of tools like Tornado Cash should look beyond their use by hackers, and go to countries like Cuba, Venezuela and India, where activists and dissidents They need to hide their financial transactions from repressive governments. “For human rights activists, it is essential that they have money that the government cannot control,” says Gladstein.
Regardless of the verdict in Pertsev’s case or that of his co-founder Roman Storm in the fall, the Tornado Cash founder’s central argument – that the underlying infrastructure of Tornado Cash has always been out of his hands – has been proven correct: Tornado Cash remains alive.
When the tool’s centralized web interface went offline last year in the wake of US sanctions and the arrests of the two co-founders (Roman Semenov, for now, remains free), Tornado Cash transactions fell by nearly 90 percent. percent, according to Chainalysis. But Tornado Cash has remained online and continues to function as a decentralized smart contract. In recent months, Chainalysis has seen its usage intermittently increase again. More than $283 million flowed into the service in March alone.
In other words, whether it represents a public utility for privacy and financial freedom or an uncontrollable money laundering machine, its creators’ claim has been confirmed: Tornado Cash remains outside of your, or anyone’s, control.
