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Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder and primary architect of Ethereum, donated 30 Ether, or more than $112,000, on Thursday to support the legal defence for Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm, the developers behind the crypto mixer Tornado Cash.

At the same time, Buterin is helping develop a new crypto mixer that will provide users with an anonymising tool for crypto transactions.

But the new Ethereum-based platform will differ from Tornado Cash in one major way it is being designed to be compliant with anti-money laundering laws.

Buterins twin moves mark a volatile period for crypto privacy. In May, Pertsev was sentenced to more than five years in prison after being convicted by a Dutch court in a $2.2 billion money laundering case.

In September, Roman Storm, another Tornado Cash dev, will be tried on similar charges in US court. Privacy advocates have rallied to Storms defence. In the meantime, Pertsev has filed an appeal to the judges verdict.

Their cases have transfixed the blockchain and open-source communities, which fear that developers will be held liable if their code is misused by third parties.

The Pertsev conviction also threw the future of smart contracts used in anonymising platforms into jeopardy.

The Dutch court ruled that Pertsev was responsible for the parties using Tornado Cashs technology even though smart contracts are designed to run autonomously.

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Coinbase, the Blockchain Association, and additional trade associations have submitted so-called friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Storm.

Matter Labs, the developer group behind layer 2 network ZKSync, donated $100,000 to the developers legal defence. The Uniswap DAO is currently mulling giving as much as $1.5 million in UNI tokens.

According to the decentralised funding platform Juicebox, the onchain legal defence fund has already attracted $2.2 million in donations.

For his part, Buterin and other researchers, including Ameen Soleimani, outlined a unique mechanism for users to maintain their privacy without offering criminals squeaky-clean crypto, according to a 2023 paper.

The technology is called Privacy Pools and lets users opt out of mixing funds with potentially ill-gotten funds.

Soleimani is already implementing the idea in his project 0xbow.

It is designed to show that DeFis cypherpunk ethos is alive and well even as the sector attracts mounting interest from Wall Street powerhouses such as BlackRock and Fidelity.

Inbar Preiss and Liam Kelly are Europe-based correspondents for DL News. Got a tip? Email them at inbar@dlnews.com and liam@dlnews.com.

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Vitalik Buterin's $112000 Tornado Cash donation is just one part of his fight for crypto privacy - DLNews

Vitalik Buterin, the visionary co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), recently highlighted the deep connection between culture and the technological advancements within the Ethereum ecosystem.

He emphasized the significance of underlying cultural dynamics in shaping Ethereums growth. Known for its pioneering role in blockchain and smart contracts, Ethereum has evolved to foster a diverse community. Here, mainly three subcultures play a pivotal role in the development.

Buterin pointed out that the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic illustrates how cultural differences can define technological paths. Initially identical in technology, their cultural divergence led them down distinct paths over the years.

Buterin states that Ethereums cultural fabric impacts everything from protocol decisions to user attraction.

Read more: Who Is Vitalik Buterin? An In-Depth Look at Ethereums Co-Founder

Culture has a similar effect to incentives indeed,culture is part of incentives. It affects who is attracted to an ecosystem and who is repelled. It affects what kinds of actions people are motivated to do, and what kinds of actions peoplecando. It affects what is consideredlegitimate both in protocol design, and at the ecosystem and application layer, Buterin said.

This influence extends to the types of changes made to the protocol, its ability to remain open and decentralized, and its appeal to high-quality developers and users.

Delving into Ethereums subcultures, Buterin identifies three main groups: Cypherpunks, Regens, and Degens. Each group interacts with Ethereums technology in ways that reflect their distinct values and goals.

Cypherpunks focuses on privacy and open-source development, Regens on governance and public goods, and Degens on financial speculation.

These subcultures enrich Ethereums community and contribute to its technological diversity. This diversity is a strength, enabling continuous adaptation and innovation. Buterin highlights that pluralism allows for multiple approaches to scaling, virtual machine design, and other technological features.

Furthermore, the concept of layer 2 scaling solutions exemplifies the importance of cultural influence. Layer 2 platforms allow subcultures to implement and experiment with their ideas, effectively creating sub-ecosystems within Ethereum. This setup fosters a dynamic environment where various subcultures can coexist, collaborate, and compete, thus driving forward the collective development of Ethereum.

Read more: A Beginners Guide to Layer-2 Scaling Solutions

However, Buterin also warns of potential pitfalls in cultural dynamics, such as the risk of echo chambers or a monoculture that could stifle innovation. To avoid these traps, he suggests maintaining a balance and promoting a culture of pluralism and cooperation.

Disclaimer

In adherence to the Trust Project guidelines, BeInCrypto is committed to unbiased, transparent reporting. This news article aims to provide accurate, timely information. However, readers are advised to verify facts independently and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content. Please note that ourTerms and Conditions,Privacy Policy, andDisclaimershave been updated.

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Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum's Cultural Influences - BeInCrypto

When 620 weary developers emerged after three days of nonstop coding at this years ETHBerlin event last week, few expected Vitalik Buterin to be speaking on stage.

The co-founder and prime architect of Ethereum was a surprise guest.

What was even more surprising were some of his reflections on building the industrys second-largest blockchain. Buterin described some of the regrets he had about the initial design of Ethereum in detail.

For many in the audience, his discourse not only evoked the halcyon days of the networks birth in 2014, but it also helped fill in the road map for what comes next for a cryptocurrency now worth $448 billion.

The US has just approved a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund, and BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, has launched its own tokenised fund on the blockchain.

The Ethereum network has spawned a sprawling ecosystem of developers and financial applications worth more than $63 billion, and it has become a byword for decentralised finance.

Still, Buterin, a 30-year-old Canadian-Russian programmer, said he has a list of things he would have done differently. They range from the development of Ethereums Virtual Machine to smart contracts to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.

And he remarked that even as Ethereum goes more mainstream, its still misunderstood.

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Bitcoin has a simple narrative which is digital gold, Buterin said. But like with Ethereum, its like Whoa, what the heck is Ethereum?

Seated on comfy couches on stage with ETHBerlin organisers Afri Schoedon and Franziska Heintel, Buterin opened his chat by sharing his fondest memories of the German capital over the years hacking in the old office with Ethereum co-founders Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke, launching Devcon Zero, and celebrating the Merge upgrade in 2022.

Then Schoedon popped the question.

With everything you know and everything you learned over the last 10 years, how would you build Ethereum differently today if you could start from scratch? Schoeden asked.

Vitalik Buterin (centre) discussed Ethereum's vision, then and now, in a discussion at ETHBerlin. Photocredit: Liam Kelly/DL News.

Buterins first qualm concerns Ethereums Virtual Machine, which is key to making the network function as a kind of decentralised mega crypto computer.

He explained that Ethereums original EVM design used 256-bit processing instead of 64- or 32-bit.

In computer architecture, the size of computing is measured in bits, with larger bits offering better efficiencies and processing more data. But 256 bits is very inefficient for most operations, and can create a lot of bloat on a blockchain, even for simple tasks.

For a network in its early days, Ethereum didnt need to optimise for this.

The original design was way too overfitted for 256-bit, Buterin told the audience.

Second, Buterin said the early Ethereum developers should have focused on making it easier to write smart contracts with fewer lines of code.

The reason? Added transparency.

With fewer lines of code, he said, people can properly see and check whats going on inside of them.

Volunteers and developers playing music at a hackathon in Berlin. Photocredit: ETHBerlin.

Instead of custom-built computers called miners running nonstop to secure a blockchain network, Ethereum switched to a different model.

Ethereums switch from a Proof of Work consensus mechanism the way nodes in a blockchain like Bitcoins agree on the state of transaction data to Proof of Stake in 2022 should have happened much earlier, Buterin said.

When we switched to Proof of Stake, we should have been willing to switch to a somewhat crappier version of Proof of Stake earlier on, he said. We ended up wasting a lot of cycles on really trying to make Proof of Stake perfect.

Instead of miners, Ethereum is now secured by validators who have staked 32 Ethereum, worth roughly $124,000, to do the same thing and be rewarded for it. If they misbehave by validating fraudulent transactions, for example, they are penalised.

In sum, the switch swapped out raw, energy-intensive computing power with economic incentives.

We could have saved a huge amount of trees if we had a much simpler proof-of-stake in 2018, Buterin said.

From big-money token transfers to backdoor honey pots, users can follow the money quite easily in crypto. Thats thanks in part to automatic logging.

But as the industry advances, notably moving from externally owned accounts like MetaMask to smart wallets like Safe, certain aspects of that crucial logging are lost.

Notably, automatic logs for Ether transfers.

It should have been in there from the beginning, Buterin said. It could have been like 30 minutes of coding from myself, Gav and Jeff. Instead, its an EIP.

Ethereum Improvement Proposals are formal proposals made by developers to change certain aspects of the Ethereum network.

EIP-7708, which Buterin submitted on May 17, would make this precise change.

Ameen Soleimani, strategic advisor at 0xbow and co-founder of MolochDAO and Reflexer Finance, discussing the Tornado Cash case. Photocredit: Liam Kelly/DL News.

Buterin also said he would have used SHA-2 for Ethereums hash function rather than the current function called Keccak.

To understand the difference, one must dig into a bit of cryptography lore, specifically about how SHA-3 became a standard. Remember, before crypto became synonymous with celebrity memecoins and nine-figure initial coin offerings, it was about complicated math.

When Ethereum was being built, the hash it used was in a hash function competition yes, thats a thing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology organised the competition to create a new hash standard alongside SHA-2.

Previous standards had been attacked and debunked. But SHA-2 was unscathed and the NIST simply wanted a safe alternative. After all, variety is the spice of life (and apparently cryptography).

Keccak was just one of several contestants that entered the competition. During the competition, the team made some minor changes to its algorithms, eventually leading to them being crowned the winner. In other words: SHA-3.

The early Ethereum team had, however, already implemented a non-standardised version of Keccak. Essentially, Ethereum is using a pre-SHA-3 iteration.

Co-founder and CPO of ChainSafe Gregory Markou and founder and CEO of Phylax Systems Odysseas Lamtzidis speaking on stage at ETHBerlin. Photocredit: ETHBerlin

Big whoop, right?

Well, this meant that Ethereum developers needed a custom library collections of reusable code that neednt be rewritten from scratch to accommodate both SHA-3 and Keccak.

Were not compatible with other systems using SHA-3, Marius van der Wijden, a core Ethereum developer, told DL News. We have to support both algorithms in the EVM.

Its essentially been solved. Today, big libraries support both encryption mechanisms.

So, yeah, big whoop indeed.

It doesnt matter in the grand scheme of things, and current development is definitely not impacted by it, said van der Wijden.

Despite the list of minor design misses, Buterin said its inevitable for any project to have a few.

Im just really happy that I feel like our core devs and their execution capacity feels like it just keeps increasing with each passing year, he said.

Were in a position to effectively and safely correct some of these mistakes.

Liam Kelly is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.

Read more:

Vitalik Buterin reveals five ways he'd rebuild Ethereum from scratch - DLNews

Few hours ago, the well-known co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin offered his support to the Tornado Cash cause, donating 30 ETH (111,000 dollars) to a fund for the legal assistance of the platform developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm, both accused of money laundering.

Vitalik, like many other users passionate about decentralized finance, supports the concept of open source and considers Tornado Cash as a mere tool for privacy, despite it being used by unreliable actors to mix over 1 billion dollars in cryptocurrencies.

Tutti i dettagli della vicenda di seguito.

Tornado cash is a mixing service born in 2019 that operates on EVM-compatible blockchains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Gnosis chain, and Binance smart chain, capable of offering maximum privacy to those who use it.

Its operation is very simple: users can deposit predefined amounts of ETH, DAI, cDAI, and WBTC (e.g., 0.1 ETH, 1ETH, 10ETH, or 100ETH) on the platform, mixing their funds with those of other individuals, and withdrawing the same coins deposited from an address different from the deposit one, thus making the last entity that received the payment anonymous.

In 2022, Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States Department of the Treasury (OFAC) which accused it of facilitating money laundering and an alleged involvement with the North Korean hacker group Lazarus.

In particular, it is believed that the same group of hackers would have laundered about 455 million dollars on the platform, stolen with the exploit of the bridge of Axie Infinity in March of the same year.

From that moment on, several CEX, decentralized services, and infrastructural providers have blocked and added to the blacklist all addresses that have made or received transactions at Tornado Cash. The protocol, however, remains still active and usable (under custom RPC, see Chainlist.org)

Shortly after the OFAC sanctions, the founders of Tornado Cash were arrested and accused of violating the anti-money laundering rules of several countries.

First, Alexey Pertsev was arrested in August 2022 and sentenced to five years in prison by a Dutch court, then received confirmation of the sentence to 64 months a few days ago.

Immediately after the initial conviction of Pertsev, the attacks on the other two founders/developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov arrived, both prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice.

In detail, Storm has been accused of having knowingly facilitated the money laundering of over 1 billion dollars, proceeds from illicit activities, while 8 Ethereum addresses linked to Semenov have been blocked for being involved in sanction evasion practices.

Questo tipo di repressione da parte delle forze dellordine per un servizio che sulla carta non provenie niente che di pi che da un codice open source, sfociato nellarresto dei fondatori della stessa piattaforma, viene da circa 2 anni criticata aspramente dallindustria delle criptovalute e dai sostenitori del concetto di privacy come Vitalik Buterin.

This is one of the first cases in the history of humanity where software developers are arrested and taken simply for writing code, regardless of the use made of the developed product.

The same crypto community that supports the Tornado Cash case, is asking in a similar case for the release of Ross Ulbricht, the creator behind the infamous Silk Road market, who is serving two consecutive life sentences without parole for non-violent offenses.

A tal proposito, il candidato presidente USA Donald Trump ha promesso di dare la grazie ad Ulbricht se verr eletto nelle prossime elezioni di novembre 2024.

Maybe Trump himself will be able to free the founders of Tornado Cash as well, with Pertsev who has appealed his conviction, filing an appeal with the Court of Appeal of S-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands and with Roman Storm who is awaiting his trial expected in September.

Vitalik Buterin, in addition to publicly defending the founders of Tornado Cash, who are only responsible for writing some lines of code, has recently committed to funding part of their legal defense.

Just a few hours ago, in fact, the magnate of the Ethereum Foundation donated as much as 30 ETH, equivalent to about 111,000 dollars, on the cryptographic crowdfunding platform Juicebox as support for the legal assistance of developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm.

Obviously Vitalik is not the only one to have participated in the crowdfunding, showing solidarity with the two developers of Tornado Cash in their legal battle to prove their innocence.

In total so far the fund on Juicebox has raised a whopping 592.95 ETH, for a total of over 2.2 million dollars across 888 different donations. The amount raised has increased by 7% in the last 7 days, with an acceleration of flows recorded after the gift of 30 ETH from Vitalik.

Other prominent figures have taken part in the initiative, such as the American computer scientist and activist naturalized Russian Edward Joseph Snowden, known for revealing to the public details of various top-secret mass surveillance programs of the US and British governments.

Questultimo effettuato diverse donazioni da 1 ETH ciascuna.

There are entities, like this one, that have donated up to 77 ETH.

In 2022, in a similar case Buterin donated 10 ETH (valued at $30,980 at that time) to AssangeDAO, a legal fund on Juicebox to support Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

It is clear that the co-founder of Ethereum is a staunch supporter of open source and that it is his personal (and moral) interest to defend this human right from the clutches of US regulators.

More here:

Vitalik Buterin donates 30 ETH to support the Tornado Cash case - The Cryptonomist

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Taiko, an Ethereum-based rollup, has launched on the mainnet following a year of development and seven testnet iterations.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the inaugural block, which included metadata containing the names of all Taiko core contributors.

As a based rollup, Taiko relies on Ethereum block validators to sequence transactions, benefiting from the liveness and security assurances provided by Ethereum. Initially, Taikos rollup protocol contracts on Ethereum are controlled by a multisig arrangement, with plans to transition to requiring 50% of blocks to use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs as part of its long-term strategy.

The project incorporates a type-1 zero-knowledge virtual machine built to emulate Ethereums core architecture. Such a design enhances protocol security by allowing the submission and contestation of proofs.

Its been a long time in the making, and were beyond thrilled to deliver what we believe is the most secure technology to scale Ethereum, Taiko co-founder and CEO Daniel Wang shares.

The project will be launching a token some weeks after the mainnet launch, with plans to introduce an incentive program to engage its community through rewards for task completion and interaction. Ahead of the mainnet launch, an airdrop was run for its community, with a distribution scale of 5% of the planned tokens 5 billion supply. A DAO is also slated for launch sometime before the end of the year, with a phased governance mechanism to incrementally update its systems.

To ensure network stability post-mainnet launch, Taiko says that it will be setting up controls for block proposals and proving for up to two weeks. Based on the progress, the processes will then be decentralized and permissionless, enabling node running, and other requisite functions for all users.

Taiko has raised $37 million from two previous funding rounds, with a seed raise led by Sequia China in Q3 2022 and a $12 million pre-Series A round led by Generative Ventures. Its Series A funding round was completed on March 2 this year led by Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, and Token Bay Capital, with participation from Wintermute Ventures, Presto Labs, Flow Traders, Amber Group, OKX Ventures, GSR, and WW Ventures, among others.

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Layer 2 rollup Taiko launches on mainnet with Vitalik Buterin proposing inaugural block - Crypto Briefing