Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is showing his support for the developers of the Tornado Cash mixing protocol by making a new donation of 100 ETH to the developer defense fund.
Vitalik Buterin makes a new donation of 100 ETH
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain and one of the most influential figures in the crypto sector, recently made a donation of 100 Ether to the Tornado Cash developers' legal defense fundRoman Storm and Alexey Pertsev.
Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, is currently trading around $2,500, which represents a 3% increase in its price over the last 24 hours. Vitalik Buterin's donation is therefore estimated at $250,000 while writing these lines.
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Tornado Cash, a non-custodial cryptocurrency mixing protocol, offers advanced privacy and anonymization services for crypto holders. Although these values are particularly important to the crypto community, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the protocol and its developers in 2022, accusing them of facilitating money laundering.
Since then, the two main developers of the Tornado Cash protocol, Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, have been apprehended and then imprisoned in the United States and the Netherlands respectively.
The affair has taken a symbolic and even political turn because it raises numerous ethical questions about the responsibility of developers for the use made of their creations and the right to anonymity..
We have recently observed that these debates are still current with the arrest of Pavel Durov in France, the CEO and creator of the private messaging tool Telegram.
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Vitalik Buterin's continued support for Tornado Cash developers
This is not the first time that Vitalik Buterin has provided financial support to help defend the developers of Tornado Cash. The recent donation of 100 ETH is actually the 3rd that the Ethereum co-founder has made, showing his continued commitment to the cause.
According to Tornado Cash's developer defense crowdfunding page, this support is in addition to 148 other payments, for a total of more than 327 ETH, or more than 800,000 dollars currently.
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Roman Storm, moved by this support, expressed his gratitude to Vitalik Buterin on the social network X: “ I can't find the words to describe what this means to me. Thank you for your unwavering support “.
I can't describe how much it means to me. Thank you for your long lasting support ❤️🙏💪 https://t.co/DjqkO5u6WR
— Roman S (@rstormsf) October 5, 2024
On September 26, 2024, American judge Katherine Failla rejected Roman Storm's request in which the latter requested that the charges against him be dropped.
The judge in the case said that the accusations against Roman Storm are not without merit and that she “ couldn't just accept Roman Storm's account that he's being prosecuted for simply writing code “.
Although Roman Storm has pleaded not guilty and maintains that Tornado Cash is open source software, he faces up to 45 years in prison if he is found guilty of the 3 counts against him.
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