The developer of the crypto-mixer Tornado Cash, Alexey Pertsev, is accused of laundering $1.2 billion.

Dutch prosecutors accuse Pertsev of involvement in 36 money laundering transactions. The largest of them is 175 ETH from the Ronin Bridge hack. The Harmony and Nomad Bridge protocols are also involved in the case. Pertsev is called an accomplice.

Just the other day, analysts #Elliptic reported that North Korean hackers Lazarus Group laundered another 12 million $ through the Tornado Cash crypto-mixer on March 14 alone. We are talking about assets stolen from the HTX and HECO Bridge crypto exchanges.

The stolen tokens were then quickly exchanged for ETH using DEX exchanges. The stolen funds then lay dormant until March 13, when stolen crypto assets began being sent through Tornado Cash. On March 14, assets worth $13 million were sent to the mixer.

Lazarus turned to Sinbad.io as its mixer of choice following the Tornado Cash sanctions in August 2022, but the service was seized by US authorities in November 2023. That's why#Lazarusreturned to Tornado Cash. The mixer operates through smart contracts running on DEX blockchains, so it cannot be hijacked and shut down in the same way as Sinbad.io was.

Another confirmation of two theses:

- Tornado Cash is not “just a code” at all, and the US Treasury Department sanctions against it do not look like a stupid initiative.

- Using crypto-mixers means receiving such assets in your wallet. Dirty, criminal. And the example with the Lazarus Group is still quite harmless.

Let us remind you that Pertsev was arrested in August 2022 on charges of money laundering through Tornado Cash. Part of the crypto community (including even Coinbase) rallied to his defense. Stating that the open source software developer is not guilty of someone somewhere illegally using that code for a criminal purpose. And they draw parallels that this is the same as judging the creators of a knife for a murder committed with a knife. The parallel is controversial.