Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was released from prison custody on Feb. 7 and will remain on house arrest while he prepares his legal appeal.
On Feb. 6, a Dutch court suspended Pertsev’s pretrial detention, which began in August 2022 and was extended in a prior court ruling in November 2024.
As part of the pretrial release, Pertsev must be electronically monitored. “It is not real freedom, but it is better than prison,” the developer wrote in a Feb. 6 social media post.
Pertsev’s case raised alarm among privacy advocates, who decried the legal action as setting a dangerous precedent for privacy-preserving technologies and developers of immutable code.
Related: Tornado Cash dev Alexey Pertsev’s bail a ‘crucial step’ in getting fair trial, defense says
Pertsev found guilty of money laundering, Tornado Cash fights US sanctions
The ‘s-Hertogenbosch Court of Appeal found Pertsev guilty of money laundering in May 2024 and sentenced the software developer to five years and four months in prison.
Dutch court officials found Pertsev guilty despite the developers of the Tornado Cash software having no control over the funds that pass through the protocol or the protocol itself.
The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash the same month Pertsev’s detention began.
Officials from the government regulator claimed that more than $7 billion in illicit funds had been laundered through the service since it launched in 2019.
OFAC also cited $455 million in funds purportedly stolen by the infamous North Korean hacking group Lazarus and allegedly laundered through Tornado Cash as a reason for sanctioning the service.
In November 2024, the US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court ruled that OFAC exceeded its congressional authority in sanctioning Tornado Cash’s immutable contracts.
A panel of judges for the court found that Tornado Cash contracts, which are lines of immutable code, were not property and could not be owned.
In January 2025, the US District Court for the Western District of Texas overturned the Tornado Cash sanctions, signaling a seismic shift for privacy tools and regulatory policy in the United States.
Like earlier rulings, the overturning of the OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash represents a seminal case that will set precedents for digital privacy cases in the United States.
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