Tornado Cash Developer Is In Jail, But There Are Hints Of A Comeback For The Crypto Mixer Regulators Hate

Tornado Cash developer Alexsey Pertsev is still in jail after being charged with money laundering for creating the mixing service, but a recent chirping by Ameen Soleimani, co-founder of SpankChain and Reflex Labs, suggests that the crypto-mingling service may soon return despite the developer’s legal troubles.

“I sincerely hope no one thought we were done,” Soleimani said.

His tweet consists of an image presenting the upcoming solution as Privacy Pools v0, a “sequel to Tornado.Cash” developed “by Ameen Soleimani” on “behalf of MolochDAO”.

MolochDAO is one of the leading decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). It was started in early 2019 with the aim of helping manage and coordinate funds intended for Ethereum’s core development. That same year, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin announced that MolochDAO was successful in raising more than US$1.5 million in ETH from a number of major blockchain industry players, including ConsenSys, the Ethereum Foundation, and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder.

Soleimani’s latest announcement has sparked a wave of mostly positive reactions on the social media platform, with user Buhlaque wishes Ameen to “[k]eep fighting the good fight”, and uses wlstrhppie give advice the developer: “you better protect yourself”.

Last August, Pertsev, a Russian citizen residing in the Netherlands, was arrested by Dutch authorities for alleged involvement in the Tornado Cash transaction mixing protocol days after the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the crypto mixing service. The developer who wrote Tornado Cash’s code is scheduled to attend a hearing next April.

The crypto-mixing service created by Pertsev uses a variety of techniques to hide the origin of used crypto, a feature that has attracted the attention of regulators, sparking accusations that Tornado Cash facilitated the laundering of millions of dollars by the Lazarus Group, a Nord. Korea-backed hacking conglomerate.

The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control decided to sanction “Tornado Cash, which has been used to launder more than $7 billion in virtual currency since its creation in 2019. This includes over $455 million stolen by the Lazarus Group, a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) state-sponsored hacking group sanctioned by the United States in 2019, in the largest known virtual currency heist to date,” the finance ministry said in its Aug. 9 statement.

Treasury claims crypto “mixers who help criminals are a threat to US national security,” indicating that Tornado’s new reincarnation could also draw the agency’s ire.