Tornado Cash initiates the We Want Justice DAO!

Sona59

In August 2022, the United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added the privacy-focused coin-mixing protocol Tornado Cash to the sanctions list, alleging assistance in money laundering. They arrested its co-founder and developer, Alexey Pertsev, citing charges of conspiring to launder money and operating an unlicensed money transmission business. Last year, criminal charges were also filed against two other co-founders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, in connection with the case.

The trials of Pertsev and Storm, who were arrested, are expected to take place this year.

To fund legal defenses for Pertsev and Storm, Roman Storm announced a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) initiative called "We Want Justice DAO" on January 23rd. He created a fundraising website for this purpose.

The website's announcement characterizes the arrest of Storm and Pertsev as a "direct attack on the open-source development community" and a precedent for regulatory overreach.

"This could have devastating consequences for developers who write and release code, which is why we need to take action immediately to protect our coding rights."

Edward Snowden, known for his involvement in privacy-focused projects like ZCash, supported the fundraising campaign, urging his 5.7 million followers to help, stating, "If you can assist, please assist; privacy is not a crime."

Ryan Adams, the founder of Bankless, pledged $10,000 and emphasized that the support is not just for Storm but for the defense of civil liberties. He stated, "This is not just for Storm; this is for our civil liberties, encouraging supporters of open-source software to donate as well." In response to Snowden, Adams explicitly expressed that this fundraising effort is about defending fundamental rights: "People think this is a fight for cryptocurrency, but it's not. It's a fight for our fundamental right to write software and protect the basic freedom of personal data privacy. If we lose this fight, they might go after https next."

In just three days, the FreePertsev&Storm fundraising page on Juicebox DAO has received approximately $485,000 worth of contributions, consisting of 233 ETH from nearly 500 donors. It's noteworthy that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also donated 12.6 ETH.

The campaign aims to raise around $1.5 million to cover legal fees for this year, including Pertsev's trial scheduled for March and Storm's trial set for September.

Samiksha

What is this initiative they're launching? Is it effective?

Ritu77

I'm here to check and understand the details of this.

Indra55

We need to learn about this trial.

Jafar224

It seems there's been an initiation for something like this.