In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added the decentralized currency mixing protocol Tornado Cash to the sanctions list and arrested him on suspicion of assisting money laundering. its co-founder and developer Alexey Pertsev. At the same time, last year they also filed a criminal complaint against two other co-founders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, accusing them of conspiracy to launder money and operating an unlicensed money transmission business.
The trial of arrested Pertsev and Storm is expected to take place this year.
Roman Storm raises defense funds
On the 23rd, Roman Storm announced the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) event on X to raise funds for his and Pertsev’s legal defense. He created a fundraising website called "We Want Justice DAO" to raise funds to support their legal affairs.
The website announced that the arrests of Storm and Pertsev were seen as "a direct attack on the open source development field" and a precedent for regulatory agencies to abuse their power.
This can cause huge losses to developers who write and publish code, so we must act now to protect our coding rights.
Edward Snowden Support: Privacy is Not a Crime
Storm’s legal defense fundraiser has received widespread support from the community. Edward Snowden, who is involved in the development of the privacy coin ZCash, called on his 5.7 million followers to actively participate and help, emphasizing the importance of privacy and pointing out that privacy itself is not a crime. This appeal attracted more attention and support.
Bankless founder Ryan Adams also said that Bankless has donated $10,000, and said, "This is not just for Storm, but for our civil liberties, and encourages supporters of open source software to also donate." In his response to Snowden, he made it more clear that the significance of supporting this donation event is to defend people’s basic freedom rights: people think this is a battle for cryptocurrency – but it is not. This is a fight for our fundamental freedoms to write software and protect the privacy of our personal data. If we lose this battle, they may target https next.
Already raised US$485,000
In just 3 days of this fundraising event, the FreePertsev&Storm fundraising page on Juicebox DAO has received 233 ETH from nearly 500 donors, worth approximately for $485,000.
Note: Donating through Juicebox DAO is one way, and you can also donate through Justice DAO and GoFundMe platforms.
It is worth mentioning that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, also donated 12.6 ETH.
The account has previously said it needs to raise about $1.5 million to cover legal costs this year, including Pertsev's upcoming trial in March and Storm's trial in September.
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