Ksenia Malik reportedly said that Dutch officials are punishing her husband(the developer of Tornado Cash) as if he “were a dangerous criminal.” Hence, a protest is planned.
Alexey Pertsev’s wife, Ksenia Malik, has blasted Dutch police for treating her husband like a “dangerous criminal” after his detention last week and that the development of open-source software shouldn’t ever be made a crime. Alexey Pertsev is the developer of Tornado Cash.
On August 12, Pertsev was detained by the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) for allegedly using the Ethereum-based privacy technology to hide unlawful financial flows and launder money.
According to the report, Malik acknowledged that the developer of Tornado Cash is still in the custody of Dutch police and that she hasn’t had a chance to speak with him since he was imprisoned.
Malik voiced her worry that Pertsev was taken into custody without cause for what she believed to be harmless behavior, saying “He’s held in jail as if he were a dangerous criminal”:
“It is very unexpected for me that a person can be arrested for writing open source code.”
The Dutch authorities have entirely prohibited her [or anybody] from having any contact with him, not even “one quick call,” according to Malik, who said that she can “only surmise how he is feeling and how terrible it is for him right now.”
Malik may feel powerless in this situation, but she is not alone. The DeFi aggregator 1inch planned a demonstration in Amsterdam on August 20 to support Pertsev and defend the liberty of developers to produce open-source software.
1inch has been especially outspoken on the subject, claiming that Pertsev’s arrest poses a threat to “set a hazardous precedent” that might “destroy the whole open-source software sector” if creators of the software are held accountable for any exploitation of their work by third parties.
Malik expressed her gratitude to everyone who supports and assists her husband in light of 1inch’s initiatives and the larger crypto community, saying that it shows that “people genuinely care.”
Malik also believes that the event will have a good impact on people’s perceptions of open-source software by raising awareness of Pertsev’s injustice.
“We want to achieve publicity so that as many people as possible know about the arrest and the reasons for its wrongness. This is a serious issue, as every open source developer and many other people can be affected by this accusation.”
However, there is some support for Pertsev’s arrest. In a recent interview, venture investor Kevin O’Leary said that Tornado Cash and other cryptocurrency privacy solutions are a part of a “crypto cowboy” mentality that “mess with the basic forces of regulation.”
He continues by saying that Pertsev’s arrest was required.
He remarked, “We want to have some stability in that institutional capital, so if we have to sacrifice him, that’s good.”
Tornado Cash restrictions will weaken the US and boost cryptocurrencies.
The U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control prohibited American citizens from communicating with Tornado Cash on August 8 because of growing fears that it was being used to launder money before the arrest.
Since Pertsev founded Tornado Cash in 2019, the U.S. Treasury estimates it has enabled more than $7 billion in money laundering operations.
