Developer Freed: Tornado Cash's Alexey Pertsev Out of Prison

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was released from prison on February 7, 2025, after nearly 18 months of incarceration. He will remain on house arrest while preparing for his legal appeal. This development comes after a Dutch court ruled to suspend Pertsev's pretrial detention on February 6, 2025, following a prior extension of his imprisonment in November 2024. Despite gaining temporary freedom, Pertsev is required to wear an electronic monitor.

Pertsev's case has sparked controversy among privacy advocates, who argue that prosecuting developers of privacy-focused software sets a dangerous precedent. Critics maintain that developers of immutable code, like Tornado Cash, lack control over how users engage with the technology. In May 2024, Pertsev was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to five years and four months in prison, despite Tornado Cash being an open-source protocol with no centralized control over transactions.

Pertsev's arrest in August 2022 coincided with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions on Tornado Cash. Authorities alleged the platform facilitated the laundering of over $7 billion in illicit funds, including $455 million linked to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus. However, the legal landscape has since shifted. In November 2024, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that OFAC had overstepped its authority by sanctioning Tornado Cash's immutable contracts. Judges asserted that lines of code without ownership did not constitute property and therefore could not be sanctioned. This ruling was further reinforced in January 2025 when the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Legal experts have hailed the decision as a landmark victory for privacy-preserving technologies, with broad implications for future digital privacy cases in the United States.