The Dutch court has pronounced Alexey Pertsev guilty of money laundering, with a sentence of a 64-month-long jail term passed.
It was a three-judge bench that passed the verdict pertaining to the Tornado Cash builder for money laundering, amounting to $2.2 billion in unlawful assets.
There is a 14-day period for the lawyers to respond.
Pertsev is known to have already served 8 months; the time period is to be adjusted with the present sentencing.
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This will act as a precedent for matters of privacy related to decentralized finance and the open-source software utilized by users having toolkits for financial privacy.
Both parties argued in court, with one side claiming Pertsev’s innocence and the other holding him responsible for the Tornado Cash case. In the defense council’s opinion, the users were responsible for the fraudulent act. This, however, did not gel well with the judges.
Incidentally, Tornado Cash is a decentralized protocol meant to confuse transaction history pertaining to public information on Ethereum.
Pertsev, along with his associate builders, had brought to the court’s attention that they had provided an answer related to users exploiting the privacy issue on the Ethereum blockchain, but this seemingly fell on deaf ears. His lawyer, Keith Cheng, too, stressed that it was not possible to prevent users from misusing the open-source smart contract code, but to no avail.
The counter from the prosecutors was that enough Pertsev was supposedly not enough, and the entire situation could have been avoided.
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Roman Storm, an associate in Tornado Cash, was also charged similarly with money laundering. The final hearing is scheduled for later. However, the crypto industry seems to be backing Alexey.
