Tornado Cash Creator in Prison, But Crypto Mixer Regulators Hate May Return

According to Ameen Soleimani, co-founder of SpankChain and Reflex Labs, the cryptocurrency mixing service could soon make a comeback despite the legal woes of its developer, Alexsey Pertsev, who is currently incarcerated on money laundering charges for creating the Tornado Cash mixing service. These charges stem from the fact that Alexsey Pertsev created the mixing service for Tornado Cash. After being accused of money laundering for inventing the mixing service, Pertsev decided to start his own company and call it Tornado Cash.

Soleimani made the statement, “I sincerely hope that no one imagined that we had arrived at our destination,” and he added.

His tweet has a graphic that identifies the impending solution as “Privacy Pools v0.” It is billed as a “sequel to Tornado.Cash” that was built “by Ameen Soleimani” on “behalf of MolochDAO.” His tweet also mentions that the solution was produced “on behalf of MolochDAO.”

MolochDAO is widely acknowledged as being among the most effective decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). It was started at the beginning of 2019 with the intention of assisting in the management and coordination of funds earmarked for the core development of Ethereum. This was the primary motivation behind the project.

In the same year, Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, made the statement that MolochDAO was successful in raising more than 1.5 million USD worth of ETH from a number of significant players in the blockchain sector. This amount of ETH is equivalent to more than USD 1.5 million. These prominent actors included ConsenSys, the Ethereum Foundation, and Vitalik Buterin, who is also a co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin is also a member of the Ethereum core development team.

The most recent announcement that Soleimani has made has been received with a range of reactions on the social media site, the overwhelming majority of which have been positive. One user, for instance, encouraged Ameen to “keep fighting the good fight,” while another offered the developer the advice, “You better guard yourself.”

In August of 2018, Russian national Pertsev, who currently resides in the Netherlands, was hauled into jail by Dutch police on the allegation that he was involved in the Tornado Cash transaction mixing protocol. This came just a few days after sanctions were placed on the cryptocurrency mixing service by the United States Department of the Treasury. In April of the following year, there is going to be a hearing in which the software engineer who was responsible for writing the code for Tornado Cash is going to be present.

One of the characteristics of the cryptocurrency mixing service developed by Pertsev that has attracted the attention of regulators is the fact that it uses a myriad of tactics to conceal the origin of the bitcoin that is being utilized. This function has also led to suspicions that Tornado Cash was involved in the laundering of millions of dollars by the Lazarus Group, which is a hacking group supported by North Korea. These charges have been made as a result of the fact that this feature exists.

Tornado Cash is the name of a virtual currency exchange that has been subject to sanctions ever since the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) made the decision to implement those penalties in 2019. More than $7 billion worth of virtual money was laundered through the use of this exchange, which was used to enable the laundering of the funds.

The United States Department of the Treasury said in a statement that was released on August 9th that “this includes more than $455 million stolen by the Lazarus Group, a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea state-sponsored hacking group that was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019 in the largest known virtual currency heist to date.” The Lazarus Group is responsible for the theft of more than $455 million of this total.

The Treasury Department says that cryptocurrency “mixers that help criminals are a threat to U.S. national security,” which suggests that the agency’s anger could also be aimed at the newly reborn version of Tornado. This is because the Treasury Department claims that crypto “mixers that assist criminals are a threat to U.S. national security.”

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