Solana Policy Institute Supports Tornado Cash Developers With $500K Donation
By: Eva Baxter
The Solana Policy Institute (SPI) has announced a significant financial pledge of $500,000 to support the legal defense of Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, the developers behind the Ethereum-based privacy protocol, Tornado Cash. This development follows the recent convictions of both developers, with Pertsev being convicted of money laundering in 2024 and Storm found guilty of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.
Tornado Cash is a blockchain protocol that allows users to anonymize their cryptocurrency transactions. Once deployed, the Tornado Cash developers had relinquished control over the smart contracts, thus allowing the system to function without centralized control. Despite this, courts in the Netherlands and the US have held the developers responsible for how the platform was used by some malicious actors, leading to their controversial convictions.
These judgments have ignited strong reactions across the crypto community, which argues that the convictions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of open-source blockchain protocols. Experts stress that developers lose the ability to monitor or guide the usage of their code once it is published as open source. The SPI, echoing industry concerns, has pointed out the dangerous precedent set by holding developers legally responsible for third-party actions, emphasizing that such rulings could stifle innovation within the software development community.
In addition to the legal defense efforts, the SPI's donation coincides with the launch of a new platform named Privacy Cash on Solana's network. Mirroring the functionality of Tornado Cash, it enables users to transfer assets with enhanced privacy, leveraging Solana’s high performance and integrated infrastructure. Helius Labs' CEO, Mert Mumtaz, highlighted that the adoption of such privacy-focused tools on Solana could offer users near-total anonymity when combined with other privacy-centric technologies.
Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute, strongly voiced support for the developers by noting, "Privacy is normal. Code is speech. And at Solana Policy Institute, we will continue to defend the rights of software developers everywhere." This robust defense of developers' rights and the innovation culminating on the Solana network underscores a significant movement within the crypto world toward privacy-focused and decentralization-centric technologies.
