The Tech Brief
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Episode 185
Season 1
The Pertsev case: A tornado for decentralized and open-source software in the Netherlands?
Tornado Cash co-founder Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to a little over five months in jail this week by a Dutch court, for helping to create a tool that obfuscates the trail of cryptocurrencies. The tool, built and run on Ethereum blockchain, was used by hackers to launder their illicitly obtained funds.
The defense argued that this was a decentralized, open-source tool, and that they had little control over its use to launder millions, possibly billions of funds by criminals.
We are joined by David Carlisle, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and author of “The Crypto Launderers: Crime and Cryptocurrencies from the Dark Web to DeFi and Beyond,” to discuss what this case means for developers and the crypto ecosystem overall.