Developer Arrested Over Tornado Cash Research

"I’m in Turkey, Izmir. They are telling my lawyer that I helped people to misuse Ethereum and I might have a charge," Federico Carrone, an Ethereum Core developer and founder of the venture studio LambdaClass, wrote last night on X.

After a night in Turkish custody, during which Carrone was able to keep his phone and live-post some of the ordeal to X, Carrone followed up with a longer, explanatory post when he was able to leave the country this morning.

"I’m finally out, safe and free," Carrone posted. According to his account of events, the Turkish Minister of Internal Affairs had filed a case accusing Carrone of helping others "misuse Ethereum", apparently connected to a privacy protocol.

"A few years ago, on the day Alexey [Pertsev] was detained, we received a call, that gladly didn’t escalate any further, regarding an academic paper and code we had published about Tornado Cash, called Tutela," Carrone wrote. "We never helped anyone engage in illegal activity, it was purely research on mixers and their properties."

Tutela is an open-source tool for the assessment of user privacy on Ethereum and Tornado Cash, according to a paper referenced by Carrone.

Carrone's arrest is a stark reminder that prosecutions that begin in the US rarely stop at the US, as anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing efforts are understood to operate under a global framework.

"Our local Turkish attorney is already working on our defense," Carrone says. "We still don’t have the full picture of what happened or why it happened, but we will bring in the best team we can and resolve this. If needed, one things are sorted out, I will come back to clear my name and defend ourselves."

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