A Dutch court has ordered Alexey Pertsev to remain in detention until April.
A Dutch court has ruled that Alexey Pertsev, the creator of Tornado Cash, an open-source crypto-mixing protocol, shall remain jailed until his next hearing on April 21.
According to The Block, the court of East Brabant in Holland has also ordered a pre-trial review for May 24.
In August, Dutch police detained Pertsev just days after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, charging that the crypto-mixing business allowed the laundering of funds for harmful cyber actors, including a hacking gang with alleged ties to North Korea, as alleged by the FBI.
The FBI accuses Tornado Cash of laundering $7 billion worth of assets, including $455 million stolen by the Lazarus gang with ties to North Korea.
Tornado Cash is a service that enables users to pool their cryptocurrency funds with those of other users. It is an open-source system that promotes privacy by mixing and pooling user funds over several wallets, obscuring inflows and outflows of cash, and providing anonymity services for cryptocurrencies.
The Dutch Ministry of Finance (FIOD) accuses Pertsev of “concealing unlawful financial flows and assisting money laundering by mixing cryptocurrencies using the decentralized Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash.”
After his imprisonment, Pertsev has had three appeals dismissed, with the most recent occurring in November 2022.
Some famous blockchain developers have defended Pertsev online, with a number of them sharing links to the FreeAlex.nl page and a petition on change.org that has received over 5,000 signatures in support of Pertsev.
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