Dutch Court Hands Russian Tornado Cash Developer Lengthy Prison Sentence

Tornado Cash mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others to hide their origins.

Russian national Aleksei Pertsev, a co-developer of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency tumbler, has received a sentence of five years and four months in prison in the Netherlands for laundering $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency from 2019 to 2022. Pertsev is one of several people accused of developing the Tornado Cash program, which mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others to hide their origins. The platform's co-founder, Roman Storm, is expected to face trial on similar charges in the United States in September. To read the original story by RFE/RL's Russian Service, click here.