Vitalik Buterin Backs Tornado Cash Legal Defense with 50 ETH

Vitalik Buterin Donates 50 ETH to Support Tornado Cash Developers

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has donated 50 ETH (worth approximately $170,000) to JusticeDAO, a legal defense fund supporting Tornado Cash developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm. Storm expressed gratitude on social media platform X, praising Buterin's unwavering support and leadership within the crypto community. This contribution represents roughly 25% of the $650,000 currently held in the JusticeDAO fund.

Buterin has a history of financially supporting individuals and organizations facing legal challenges. In 2022, he donated 10 ETH to AssangeDAO, a fund dedicated to supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In October 2024, he contributed an additional 100 ETH to Free Pertsev and Storm Juicebox funds, supplementing a previous donation of 30 ETH in May.

Tornado Cash has faced scrutiny since August 2022, when the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the protocol, alleging its misuse by North Korean hackers to launder over $7 billion in cryptocurrency. Alexey Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands in 2022 and later convicted of money laundering, receiving a sentence of over five years in prison. Roman Storm, who was released on bail, has filed motions to dismiss charges against him following a U.S. Federal Appeals Court ruling in November 2024 that deemed sanctions against Tornado Cash's smart contracts unlawful.

Tornado Cash is a decentralized privacy tool on Ethereum-compatible networks, designed to obfuscate the origins of cryptocurrency transactions using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs). The project's governance is managed through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) utilizing the $TORN token.