Tornado Cash Founder Remains in Custody Without Any Charges
A Dutch court ruling has determined that Alexey Pertsev, the creator of Tornado Cash, an open-source crypto-mixing protocol, will remain in detention until his next hearing on April 21.
The East Brabant, Holland court has also scheduled a pre-trial review for May 24. Pertsev was arrested by Dutch authorities in August, shortly after the US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, alleging that the service facilitated the laundering of funds for malicious cyber actors, including a hacking group that the FBI linked to North Korea.
Tornado Cash is accused of laundering a total of $7 billion, including $455 million stolen by the North Korea-linked Lazarus group.
Tornado Cash is an open-source protocol that enables users to pool their cryptocurrency funds, advocating privacy in mixing and pooling users’ funds within multiple wallets and offering anonymization services for cryptocurrencies.
Pertsev is accused of facilitating money laundering through the decentralized platform, according to the Dutch Ministry of Finance (FIOD).
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However, he has not yet been formally charged with a crime and has been detained under a provision in Dutch law that permits people to be held for 110-day intervals without being formally charged.
Despite three unsuccessful appeals, many prominent blockchain developers have expressed support for Pertsev online, sharing links to the FreeAlex.nl page and a change.org petition that has garnered over 5,000 signatures.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
