Cointelegraph | Brayden Lindrea  | Aug 14, 2022

Mr. Wonderful thinks that crypto needs more regulation and less “crypto cowboys” like Tornado Cash creator Alexey Pertsev, who he suggested was a necessary sacrifice to create stability for institutional inflows.

Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank host and venture capitalist:

• Ethereum-based crypto mixer Tornado Cash are a part of a “crypto cowboy” culture that shouldn’t have a place in the industry.  Instead, crypto needs a “rules-based environment” in order to attract real institutional capital into the digital-asset industry, and much of that regulation needs to stamp out protocols like Tornado Cash, which enables users to conduct anonymous transactions and therefore potentially engage in criminal activity.

“At the end of the day, it’s okay to arrest that guy. Why? He’s messing with the primal forces of regulation […] If we have to sacrifice him, that’s okay, because we want to have some stability in that institutional capital.”

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Gnosis co-founder Stefan George:

• he protocol brings “much-needed privacy” to Ethereum and that writing open-source software should be recognized as “an expression of free speech.”

Patrick Collins, Chainlink Lead Developer Advocate:

• the decision to remove Tornado Cash’s GitHub account is “much worse than sanctioning a website,” as code is speech and, by doing so, the U.S. Treasury is violating the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

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Protocol | Aug 15, 2022

Spinning Crypto Perspectives

Dutch authorities say there may be more arrests. The Netherlands’ Financial Advanced Cyber Team, part of the country’s Fiscal Information and Investigation Service, began investigating Tornado Cash in June.

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• The arrested man’s name is Alexey Pertsev, his wife confirmed to the Block. He was apprehended last Wednesday in Amsterdam’s city center, two days after the United States issued sanctions against Tornado Cash. Pertsev is not a founder of Tornado Cash. The founders are Roman Semenov and Roman Storm. Neither has been arrested, and neither responded to Protocol’s requests for comment.
• According to Dutch authorities, Pertsev is “suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering,” — not personally disobeying sanctions or making other illegal money transfers with his own funds.

Liability for contributing code is a complex question. Much depends on the specifics of a country’s law.

• In the United States, for example, posting code on GitHub is legal in most cases so long as it’s not a violation of intellectual property law. That’s because code is viewed as speech protected by the First Amendment.
• Jeffrey Blockinger, general counsel at Quadrata, says most developers don’t need to be concerned about an arrest. “While privacy concerns are legitimate, this arrest is reportedly focused on evidence of actual criminal activity,” he told Protocol. Quadrata, which provides an identity layer for blockchains, says it can help block people subject to sanctions and other bad actors from completing transactions.

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