- Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev will remain in custody for an extra 90 days, despite no charges being officially laid at his door
- Pertsev was arrested on August 10, two days after OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash
- It is assumed that he is being held on suspicion of aiding in money laundering
The Tornado Cash developer arrested by Dutch authorities two weeks ago has been ordered to stay in prison for an additional 90 days, despite having no charges yet laid against him. Alexey Pertsev was apprehended earlier this month on charges that were at the time thought to relate to facilitating money laundering through his work on the protocol, but with no official word this is still conjecture. All that is known is that Pertsev was denied bail after being in custody for 15 days following his arrest and remains behind bars.
No Charges Forthcoming
Pertsev was arrested on August 10, two days after the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it was sanctioning the use of the mixing service, as well as losing 44 Ethereum addresses linked to illegal activity that were also being monitored.
Dutch authorities got wind of Pertsev having worked on the protocol and, seemingly independently and yet obviously informed by OFAC’s activities, arrested him on the understanding that he had allowed bad actors to launder money through Tornado Cash. This drew parallels in the crypto community with Elon Musk being arrested if a Tesla driver killed a pedestrian in a Tesla.
Pertsev’s Wife Has Seen no Documentation
According to DeFi Education Fund, a group that supports DeFi-friendly policies and advocates for the use of decentralised open-source data like Tornado Cash’s code, as of August 17 no charges have been filed against Pertsev, and his wife told Decrypt that, “It is not clear what arguments they had for not releasing him under house arrest” and added that she hasn’t yet seen any official documents regarding the reason for his detention.
According to Dutch law, suspected offenders can stay in pre-trial detention for up to 110 days, during which charges must be made and an initial public hearing set.
