Alexey Pertsev, a Tornado Cash developer, was released under house arrest in the Netherlands after nine months in jail but still faces a 64-month sentence.
Alexey Pertsev, a creator of the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, was released from a Dutch jail on Friday after being held there for nine months.
He is still facing a 64-month prison sentence for his supposed involvement in helping to launder over a billion dollars through the site. Pertsev was caught in May 2024 and got a sentence of five years and four months.
His coworkers, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, are also dealing with legal issues in the United States. Storm’s trial is scheduled for April, and he could get up to 45 years in jail. Semenov is still missing and is wanted by the FBI.
Tornado Cash lets people make secret transactions on Ethereum by mixing money from different users. It gained attention when the North Korean hacking group Lazarus used it to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in 2022.
This caused the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to impose sanctions on the site, but this decision was later found to be illegal. Still, Storm and Semenov were charged.
In the Netherlands, Pertsev spent almost a year in jail before the court allowed him to stay at home with electronic tracking. His release changes his legal situation, but the possibility of a prison term leaves his future unclear.
