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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 3
  • Research debt items: 5

Netherlands v. Pertsev (Tornado Cash)

Summary

East Brabant District Court judgment ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:2069 (May 14, 2024) convicted a Tornado Cash developer of money laundering and imposed a prison sentence of 64 months. An official English judiciary news page identifies the defendant as Alexey Pertsev.

Verified Facts

  • The judgment is published as ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:2069 by Rechtbank Oost-Brabant; the decision date is May 14, 2024; the case number is 82/198261-22.1
  • The court’s contents abstract states conviction for money laundering of large quantities of cryptocurrency, that the defendant developed Tornado Cash with co-perpetrators, and that the court imposed a prison sentence of 64 months.1
  • The charged period in the indictment as described in the judgment includes activity from July 9, 2019 through August 10, 2022, alleging habitual money laundering involving approximately 535,809 ETH valued at approximately $1,217,343,820, while knowing or reasonably suspecting criminal origin.1
  • The judgment states Tornado Cash was developed so that it automatically performed acts essential to money laundering, combined maximum anonymity and concealment techniques with a serious lack of functionalities enabling identification, control, or investigation, and that the defendant continued developing and exploiting Tornado Cash while disregarding abuse occurring through it.1
  • Official English judiciary news states that a developer of Tornado Cash received a jail sentence for laundering billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and identifies Alexey Pertsev in that coverage.2
  • U.S. Treasury’s August 23, 2023 press release states that a third co-founder of Tornado Cash, Alexey Pertsev, was arrested on related money-laundering charges in the Netherlands in August 2022 by Dutch law enforcement authorities.3

Historical Context

Dutch authorities opened a criminal investigation (referred to in the judgment as Kidwelly) after reports that Tornado Cash was used to conceal proceeds of digital thefts. The East Brabant District Court issued its first-instance judgment on May 14, 2024. Parallel U.S. criminal proceedings against other alleged co-founders proceeded separately.

Jurisdiction: Netherlands, East Brabant District Court (first instance). Authority level: first-instance criminal judgment under Dutch law. The court’s reasoning addresses developer liability for a mixing protocol under Dutch money-laundering law and is not a U.S. holding. Appeal status requires separate verification.

Relationships

  • CASE-NL-V-PERTSEV cites SRC-PERTSEV-ECLI-2024.
  • CASE-NL-V-PERTSEV related_to TOPIC-TORNADO-CASH.
  • CASE-NL-V-PERTSEV related_to CASE-US-V-STORM.

Sources

  1. SRC-PERTSEV-ECLI-2024: Netherlands v. Pertsev, ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:2069 (May 14, 2024).
  2. SRC-PERTSEV-RECHTSPRAAK-EN-2024: Dutch Judiciary English News — Tornado Cash Developer Jail Sentence (May 2024).
  3. SRC-TREASURY-SEMENOV-2023: Treasury Designates Roman Semenov, Co-Founder of Tornado Cash (Aug. 23, 2023).

Research Debt

  • Add appeal filings and status at Gerechtshof ’s-Hertogenbosch.
  • Add FIOD arrest press release (Aug. 12, 2022) as a dedicated source.
  • Charged period spans 2019–2022; add offense_date only if a primary source identifies a single focal act date (otherwise keep period narrative only).
  • Extract and footnote additional holding quotations from the full Dutch judgment with certified translation where relied upon for English pages.
  • Add counsel identification from Dutch court records.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2024-05-14
  • Arrest date: 2022-08
  • Last verified: 2026-07-23

  1. SRC-PERTSEV-ECLI-2024 — Netherlands v. Pertsev, ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:2069 (May 14, 2024). Primary authority (pseudonymized judgment). ↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-PERTSEV-RECHTSPRAAK-EN-2024 — Dutch Judiciary English News — Tornado Cash Developer Jail Sentence (May 2024). Official court news summary. ↩

  3. SRC-TREASURY-SEMENOV-2023 — Treasury Designates Roman Semenov, Co-Founder of Tornado Cash (Aug. 23, 2023). Official government press release. ↩