Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has made a significant contribution toward a legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev.
According to a Dec. 31 X post from the Juicebox project Free Pertsev and Storm, Buterin donated 50 Ether (ETH) — roughly $170,000 at the time of publication — to Storm’s and Pertsev’s legal aid.
Storm reported that the contribution was roughly 25% of the total $650,000 available to the Tornado Cash developer through JusticeDAO ahead of his trial.
50 ETH donation from Vitalik Buterin. Source: Free Pertsev and Storm
In 2022, Dutch authorities arrested and charged Pertsev for his involvement with the cryptocurrency mixing service. In May 2024, he was found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to more than five years in prison, though Pertsev will appeal the verdict.
United States prosecutors later charged Storm and fellow developer Roman Semenov with money laundering, sanctions violations, and fraud related to their roles with Tornado Cash.
Storm was given bail conditions ahead of his trial, scheduled to begin on April 14, while Semenov remained at large at the time of publication.
Many of the criminal charges against the Tornado developers seemed to stem from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control adding the mixer to its Specially Designated Nationals list in August 2022. US officials said at the time that bad actors, including North Korean hackers, had used Tornado Cash to launder more than $7 billion worth of crypto since 2019.
Legal outcry from crypto users
The sanctions against the mixer and criminal charges against the developers have drawn outrage from many in the crypto industry.
Buterin donated 100 ETH — roughly $240,000 at the time — to the Free Pertsev and Storm Juicebox in October, but GoFundMe shut down a similar fundraising effort in February.
The US Treasury Department faces two lawsuits filed by crypto advocacy group Coin Center and a group of Tornado Cash users backed by Coinbase.
An appellate court said in November that the Treasury had “overstepped” in sanctioning the crypto mixer’s immutable smart contracts, but the ruling did not appear to have affected the criminal case against Storm.
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