A week after the arrest by 29-year-old Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, a group of about 50 crypto and privacy advocates are protesting on Dam Square in Amsterdam. Xenia Malik, Pertsev’s wife, helped organize the demonstration and also participates in it. She hopes the protest will bring publicity about the nature of Pertsev’s arrest.
Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested last week by Dutch authorities on suspicion of laundering some $1 billion in stolen money. The Dutch authorities claimed that the people behind Tornado Cash were making large-scale profits from these transactions.
#FreeAlexPertsev
although crypto mixers are not illegal, they provide anonymity when conducting transactions, which has been misused to launder illegally obtained money.
Should developers be prosecuted if their code is used for this kind of illegal activity? The protesters disagree, arguing that Pertsev should not be held responsible for writing open-source code, regardless of how it is used by others.
On the event page before the protest is written that the allegations against Alex threaten to kill the entire open-source software segment. “Nobody will dare to write and publish open-source code, nobody will invest in the segment if they can be held responsible for the use of the tool they have created by other parties.”
Also Oxorio co-founder Petr Korolev speaks out about the incident.
“On the one hand, Alex is my friend, I’m worried about him, his wife hasn’t been able to visit him for two weeks, and we don’t understand what’s going on. On the other hand, this is an important matter, and I’m afraid if Alex is found guilty it will set a precedent that could hit developers of open source code.”
@alex_pertsev was arrested at the beginning of August.
1/ A thread explaining the case and what it could do to the open source software development space ⬇
#freealex #OpeSourceNotACrime pic.twitter.com/fMJel86QdK— Petr Korolev 🦇🔊 (@skywinder) August 19, 2022
According to Korolev, Pertsev has not been officially charged but has been questioned about his role in developing the protocol.
On Wednesday, Finnish product manager Daria Mironova launched a Change.org petition set up to draw attention to the reasons for the arrest. This petition has now been signed about 1,700 times.