DeFi
Vitalik Buterin’s $112,000 Tornado Cash donation is just part of his fight for cryptocurrency privacy – DL News
- Vitalik used Tornado Cash to send funds to Ukraine.
- On Thursday, he donated 30 Ether for his legal defense.
- The new protocol combines respect for privacy.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and lead architect of Ethereum, on Thursday donated 30 Ether, or more than $112,000, to support the legal defense of Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm, the developers behind crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
At the same time, Buterin helps develop new crypto mixer which will provide users with an anonymization tool for crypto transactions.
But the new Ethereum-based platform will differ from Tornado Cash in one major way: It is designed to comply with anti-money laundering laws.
Volatile period
Buterin’s twin measures mark a volatile time for cryptocurrency privacy. In May, Pertsev was sentenced to more than five years in prison after being found guilty by a Dutch court in a legal case. $2.2 billion money laundering case.
In September, Roman Storm, another Tornado Cash developer, will stand trial on similar charges in a US court. Privacy advocates rallied to Storm’s defense. In the meantime, Pertsev appealed the judges’ verdict.
What’s next for Tornado Cash developers?
Their cases have transfixed the blockchain and open source communities, which fear that developers will be held liable if their code is misused by third parties.
Pertsev’s conviction also jeopardized the future of smart contracts used in anonymization platforms.
The Dutch court ruled that Pertsev was responsible for the parties using Tornado Cash’s technology, even though smart contracts are designed to operate autonomously.
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Coinbase, the Blockchain Association and other trade associations submitted so-called “friend of the court” briefs supporting Storm.
Matter Labs, the group of developers behind the ZKSync Layer 2 network, donated $100,000 for the legal defense of the promoters. The Uniswap DAO is I’m currently thinking giving away up to $1.5 million in UNI tokens.
According to decentralized finance platform Juicebox, the on-chain legal defense fund has already attracted $2.2 million in donations.
Privacy and Blackrock
For his part, Buterin and other researchers, including Ameen Soleimani, described a unique mechanism for users to maintain their privacy without offering criminals squeaky clean crypto, according to a 2023 report. paper.
The technology is called Privacy Pools and allows users to opt out of commingling funds with potentially ill-gotten funds.
Soleimani is already implementing this idea in his 0xbow project.
It is designed to show that the cypherpunk philosophy of DeFi is alive and well, even as the sector receives growing interest from Wall Street powerhouses such as BlackRock and Fidelity.
Inbar Preiss and Liam Kelly are European correspondents for DL News. Do you have any advice? Email them at inbar@dlnews.com and liam@dlnews.com.