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Dutch Court Jails Tornado Cash Developer

Koos Couvée
London Bureau Chief

A Dutch court sentenced a Russian national to more than five years in prison Tuesday for laundering $1.2 billion for North Korean state-sponsored hackers and other cybercriminals through Tornado Cash, the decentralized cryptocurrency-mixing protocol he helped create. In a high-profile case that critics contend imperils financial privacy and the cryptocurrency sector's development of open-source software, a panel of three judges in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, found Alexey Pertsev, 31, guilty of handling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Ethereum from 36 separate cyber-related incidents from 2019 to 2022. "The defendant and his co-perpetrators developed a privacy tool that has created...

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