⛓️Ethereum users. Look into Pulsechain. Go to https://t.co/LuUTNUZdxb
🍴It is a full-state forked copy of ETH.
🆓 In other words, if you had ETH or ERC tokens in a self-custody wallet on May 10th of 2023, you have free coins waiting for you on Pulsechain (chain ID 369).
0/ The Tornado Cash legal saga continues.
Alex Pertsev is still fighting for his freedom.
Guest thread by @ameensol spotlighting @alex_pertsev's legal case in the Netherlands and the ongoing battle to protect privacy. 🧵
🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️
🙏 I'm Roman Storm. To @ethereum, and to everyone who has stood with me through this - thank you. Truly.
When you're a developer facing decades in prison for writing open-source code, the nights get very long. And then this community shows up. Again and again. And I remember I'm not alone. That's everything. 💚
Let me be clear about what this case actually is. I didn't rob anyone. I didn't steal, didn't touch a single user's funds, never took custody of a single coin. I wrote software. Privacy software - the kind of thing that, in any sane world, belongs on a résumé. Not in an indictment. 🧑💻
So I want to tell you why, even now, I have every reason to keep fighting. Because this isn't blind hope. The courts have already started to speak - and what they said has a name. Van Loon. 📜
In November 2024, a federal appeals court - the Fifth Circuit - looked at what the government did to Tornado Cash and said it plainly: government broke the law. OFAC overstepped its authority when it sanctioned the protocol. Those immutable smart contracts aren't "property" that belongs to anyone. ⚖️
Sit with the court's own words, because they're extraordinary. The judges described Tornado Cash's contracts as "unownable, uncontrollable, and unchangeable — even by [their] creators." 🤯
Uncontrollable. Even by their creators. A federal court, after studying the actual technology, found that I literally cannot control the code I helped write. It runs on its own. It always will. No one can stop it - not me, not OFAC, not anyone. That's not a loophole. That's just how it works.
And the government's own position has since crumbled. After Van Loon, OFAC removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list entirely in March 2025. The protocol they once branded a national-security threat - delisted, out in the open. ❌
And yet they're still prosecuting me. So look closely at what they're actually holding against me - because the harder you look, the thinner it gets. 🔍
My team integrated Chainalysis's official OFAC sanctions screening directly into the Tornado Cash interface - a real-time compliance measure to block sanctioned addresses. The government's response to that? They called it "window dressing." Compliance, dismissed as decoration. 🙃
Then there are my own words, from my own chats, reacting to hackers getting traced: "I'm glad those fuckers are detected." That's the person they're branding a criminal conspirator. The story and the evidence don't match - because the story isn't true. 💔
And once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere. A court says the protocol is uncontrollable even by its creator - yet they want to jail me for "controlling" it. That's the kind of case this is. It gets worse. ⬇️
The indictment's most-quoted line - a dramatic "how do you go about laundering $600 million?" - was pitched as a co-founder's words. It wasn't. It was written by a CoinDesk reporter asking the team how mixers work. A forwarded message got mislabeled in the data extraction. A journalist's question became Exhibit A. 📰
Then the most damning of all: on the very day I was indicted, FinCEN officials privately told these SDNY prosecutors that non-custodial tools like this are NOT money services businesses. The prosecutors walked into court and argued the opposite. My defense didn't learn about it for ~21 months. ⚖️
Even the DOJ doesn't seem to believe its own theory. Weeks before insisting I'm guilty, the same DOJ told the Supreme Court - in its amicus brief in Cox Communications v. Sony Music — that "knowledge that a buyer plans to misuse a product with substantial legitimate uses, without more, does not support an inference of culpable intent." The exact opposite of what they argue against me. Same DOJ. Weeks apart. 🔁
https://t.co/cRoJAQZwB8
So step back. If you only hear "crypto mixer," you might assume the worst. But this is not a shadowy contraption. It's mainstream, studied, respected technology. 🎓
Stanford teaches Tornado Cash — not as a cautionary tale, but as the textbook example of how cryptographic privacy works. It's a final-exam question in CS251, Dan Boneh's renowned cryptography course. 📚
https://t.co/2A77txqf4g
https://t.co/65jdsOEtuw
And Stanford's own exam notes something the prosecutors won't: Tornado Cash ships a built-in compliance tool, letting a user voluntarily prove which deposit was theirs to satisfy an exchange like Coinbase. Privacy and compliance, designed to coexist. 🔎
This isn't fringe, either. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a primer on Tornado Cash for economists and policymakers - treating it as legitimate financial-privacy infrastructure, and describing that very same compliance tool. 🏦
https://t.co/d6orD3ydQT
ers
So add it all up. Technology taught at Stanford. Analyzed by the Federal Reserve. Vindicated in a federal court of appeals. Built with real-time sanctions screening the government waved off as "window dressing." And the developer who helped build it - me, is facing prison. Tell me that sits right. 😞
This is why it reaches so far beyond me. If publishing neutral, open code makes you a criminal for whatever a stranger later does with it, every developer here is exposed. Every wallet team. Every protocol. Everyone who's ever pushed to a public repo. 🧨
Privacy is not a crime. Open source is not a conspiracy. Writing software is not the same as committing the acts of those who misuse it. The easiest principles in the world to defend - which is exactly why we can't afford to lose them here. 🛡️
Van Loon is the law catching up to the truth. Now I deserve the same justice the protocol already received. We're close. The arguments are strong. And with you behind me, we can finish this. 💪
So please — follow my co-founder in this fight @alex_pertsev, and share our stories. And if you're able, support my legal defense at 👉 https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn 💚 Every voice, every dollar, every repost tells a court — and tells me — that I don't stand alone.
I'm Roman Storm. We started this together. Let's end it together. 🌪️
🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️
Most criticisms of BIP110 come from people who don’t understand the history that made BIP110 necessary.
If your understanding of BIP110 is “people are trying to change Bitcoin” you’ve missed the entire argument.
Here’s the timeline as I understand it. Please comment if I missed anything or made any mistakes.
1/ Bitcoin originally had anti-spam protections.
Satoshi implemented the first spam filters, and suggested there were “other things we could do if necessary” when trying to prevent use of the blockchain for arbitrary data.
Developers unanimously agreed that data storage was discernable, undesirable and to be discouraged
2/ SegWit introduced discounted witness space.
This was so that UTXOs were more cheap to consume than create. It was deliberately not made too large as there were concerns about it being used for spam.
Meant for scaling.
People that would use it to store non-monetary data would still be limited by the existing spam filters.
3/ Taproot increased script flexibility and bypassed existing filters.
Meant for privacy and smart contracting.
Created new ways to embed arbitrary data that would be relayed by the entire network before being mined
4/ Developers discovered the loophole.
Large amounts of non-payment data could now be stored more efficiently than before.
5/ Ordinals, inscriptions, tokens, and data schemes appeared.
6/@LukeDashjr proposed fixes.
He argued the bug was understood and fixable - simply subject taproot spends that reveal large amounts of frivolous data to the existing limits that applied to data storage elsewhere.
Core declined to update the filters and fix the bug with taproot.
7/ A new philosophy emerged inside Core.
“If it’s valid at the protocol level, it cannot be spam.” A standard that does not exist on any other protocol.
This replaced Bitcoin’s traditional anti-spam posture.
8/ Financial interests formed around the loophole.
Companies, exchanges, token issuers, NFT projects, and infrastructure providers began profiting from non-payment usage.
9/ The longer it would remaine open, the weaker Bitcoin would become, on a cultural level and on a technical level due to massively decreasing its efficiency as a payment network
Businesses were created with the expectation of a passive network that would not defend itself.
Non Bitcoin users became invested in the schemes.
Economic interests formed around preserving them.
10/ Core then went from failing to fix the filters to intentionally removing them in Core 30.
This was presented as “neutrality”.
Instead it was active solitication of parasitic use cases. They had moved from ignoring/tolerating spam to accommodating it.
11/ Trust in Core governance began to erode.
The issue was no longer inscriptions.
The issue was now the need to redefine Bitcoin as a solely monetary network, not a permissionless file storage network as that would create problems for users very quickly.
This is when @BitcoinKnots became popular.
12/ BIP110 was proposed - written by @dathon_ohm
To restore Bitcoin’s original anti-spam posture.
Not a new direction, but a revival of a network hostile to non-monetary usage.
To summarize:
First the loophole was created..
Then people exploited it..
Then businesses formed around it..
Then the businesses corrupted the trusted developers in the space who are now being fired as the network drops their client.
Because of all this, saying “large OP_RETURNs have always been consensus-valid” is completely disingenuous - a red herring at best.
The entire mainstream crypto market is built on institutional grift. That’s why crypto hype (aka VC funding games) died with AI.
True believers use @PulseChain because it was never about number go up for us. It was about creating a movement.
The entire mainstream crypto market is built on institutional grift. That’s why crypto hype (aka VC funding games) died with AI.
True believers use @PulseChain because it was never about number go up for us. It was about creating a movement.
My attempt to protect users from scam apps on the @AppStore has gotten my Apple Developer account flagged for termination - ironically, for "dishonest activity".
Unless it's reversed by June 30, all new installs of Sparrow Wallet will fail, and development on macOS will end.
The context: since 2023, more than a dozen fake "Sparrow" apps have appeared on the App Store, as recently as April this year. Users have contacted me after losing their savings, in some cases their life savings, to these impersonators.
I'm the developer of the real Sparrow Wallet, a desktop app, and I hold the registered US trademarks for the name and logo. I have publicly warned @Apple and the community about these fake apps from early 2024, but they keep appearing.
The app @Apple flagged was a placeholder that was never published. Its only purpose was to warn users that Sparrow is desktop-only and that other "Sparrow" apps aren't mine. This approach may have been misguided, but there was nothing dishonest about it.
I'm confident this is an automated misclassification that Apple would reverse on review - but I may be terminated before a human ever looks at my appeal. The cost would fall on @Apple's own users: blocked installs and no updates for a tool people rely on, which opens the door for more fakes.
If you value Sparrow, a repost would help. @AppleSupport
Had journalists attempted actual journalism w/ Anthony Fauci, Covid would never have turned into a multi year global lockdown. Instead, as the supercut below will remind you, they used these nonstop interviews to portray him as a messiah.