Tornado Cash Devs Get $500K From Solana Policy Institute to Appeal Convictions

The Solana Policy Institute, a leading crypto lobbying group, announced Thursday it will donate $500,000 to aid the legal defenses of Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev—developers of Ethereum coin mixing service Tornado Cash that were convicted of crimes in the United States and the Netherlands, respectively. 

Storm was convicted earlier this month in Manhattan for the crime of operating an illegal money transmitting business, and now faces up to five years in federal prison. Pertsev was sentenced to over five years in prison last year, after a Dutch court found him guilty of money laundering.

The legal woes of both Tornado Cash developers have, for years, triggered concern within the crypto industry and broader tech circles. Advocates have long warned that successful convictions of either man for their work on developing and maintaining the Tornado Cash platform could have major ramifications for software developers in all contexts.

“These prosecutions continue to set a chilling precedent that threatens the software development industry,” Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute, said in a Thursday blog post announcing the donation. “If the government can prosecute developers for creating neutral tools that others misuse, it fundamentally changes developers’ risk calculus.”

Though the Trump administration has in many respects taken an aggressively pro-crypto approach since January, the president’s Department of Justice opted to press forward with criminal charges against Storm initially filed in 2023 by the Biden administration.

In an apparent shift in policy, however, a top DOJ official told an audience of crypto industry leaders last week that federal prosecutors will no longer pursue the charge they successfully convicted Storm of, against developers of “truly decentralized” software that does not take custody of user funds but is used by criminal entities to launder digital assets.

Crypto policy leaders have had to walk a tightrope as of late between applauding the Trump administration’s pro-crypto moves, and warning about the risks posed if Storm’s conviction is upheld. The true test will come during Storm’s appeal—which will clarify if the Trump DOJ has undergone any true change of heart on the subject of decentralized software developers and criminal liability.

The issue has become increasingly existential to the crypto industry as a whole. On Wednesday, 114 crypto companies and tech lobbying groups—including the Solana Policy Institute—sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee warning they would collectively protest an upcoming crypto market structure bill if it did not explicitly exempt decentralized software developers from criminal liability on the charge the DOJ used to convict Storm. 

Today’s donation also hits on an intra-industry tension that has been brewing for some weeks. 

Tornado Cash operates on the Ethereum network, and members of the Ethereum community have long been vocal in their support of the legal defenses of Storm and Pertsev.

In recent weeks, however, some industry players—most notably, Bitcoin pioneer Erik Voorhees, the founder of crypto exchange ShapeShift and Venice AI—have questioned whether prominent boosters of Solana, long a rival network to Ethereum, would step up to support the Tornado Cash developers in the name of defending broader crypto principles.

Today’s donation by the Solana Policy Institute would appear to counter that criticism. But leadership of the organization, founded earlier this year, also has particularly deep roots in advocacy for software developers generally, and for Tornado Cash’s developers specifically.