ETH Foundation and Keyring Raise Funds for Tornado Cash Developers
Open-Source Defense Fund Gains ahead Support
The ETH Foundation and the Keyring network have launched a joint campaign to raise legal defense funds for Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev. The initiative, which began Thursday, has collected more than $22,000 as of Friday morning, according to its website.
Funds will come from protocol fees generated by Keyring’s ZkVerified permissioned vaults over their first two months of operation. The ETH Foundation said the model “ensures that the first users of a vault directly support the legal protection of privacy-focused developers.”
“By linking the growth of new financial tools with the protection of the people who build them, Keyring demonstrates that communities can strengthen resilience while driving innovation forward,” the Foundation added in its statement.
Investor Takeaway
Legal Battles Continue for Tornado Cash Developers
Roman Storm was convicted in the U.S. this summer on one charge of money transmission but avoided a verdict on separate money laundering and sanctions counts later than a split jury. His co-developer, Alexey Pertsev, was sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court in 2023 for facilitating $1.2 billion in money laundering through Tornado Cash between 2019 and 2022. Both are appealing their convictions.
Tornado Cash, an open-source privacy protocol built on ETH, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2022 for allegedly assisting to obscure illicit transactions linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The case against its developers has become a flashpoint for debates over privacy, code authorship, and developer liability in decentralized finance.
Crypto advocates and policy organizations have stepped up funding efforts since the convictions. The Solana Policy Institute donated $500,000 in August, while the ETH Foundation previously pledged another $500,000 to support Storm’s defense. The latest Keyring initiative aims to make legal defense funding self-sustaining through ongoing protocol activity.
Changing U.S. Prosecutorial Stance
The campaign comes amid signs of a softer tone from U.S. prosecutors toward software developers. Last week, Matthew J. Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said that “writing code is not a crime.” The comment has been viewed within the industry as an acknowledgment of the distinction between building open-source tools and using them for illegal purposes.
Privacy advocates hope the Justice Department’s shift in rhetoric will translate into fairer treatment for developers facing charges tied to decentralized software. “We still have a long way to go in this appeal as the court has decided that an additional investigation has to be done,” Pertsev wrote on X on Friday. “We keep working towards justice and your assist is invaluable to #CodeWithoutFear.”
Investor Takeaway
Building a Legal Defense Infrastructure
The Keyring model viewks to establish a repeatable framework for funding legal defense within open-source ecosystems. By linking vault fees directly to developer legal protection, supporters say the initiative could serve as a precedent for future privacy-related cases. Observers note that the approach mirrors broader efforts to build decentralized funding mechanisms that operate outside of traditional donations or grants.
While the sums raised so far are small compared to institutional pledges, the ETH Foundation’s involvement adds legitimacy to the concept. The organization has not disclosed whether the new model will be expanded beyond the Tornado Cash cases, but Keyring’s success in raising funds rapidly suggests that crypto communities are willing to back initiatives that secureguard developer rights.
