An Arbitrum DAO proposal that aimed to provide up to $1.28 million in Bitcoin to support Tornado Cash inventors Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm in their legal defense against criminal accusations has been withdrawn by the person who created it. According to recent updates, the plan was removed because token holders expressed worries about possible legal responsibilities related to the donation.
Joseph Axisa, a contributor to Arbitrum, had proposed setting aside money for a fund that would help people who were accused of crimes. Nevertheless, rumors state that the author took the proposal down from the Arbitrum discussion area.
The plan, which was made public on Wednesday, called for pledging between 200,000 and 600,000 ARB tokens, or roughly $400,000 to $1.2 million, to help with Storm and Pertsev’s legal defense. They are accused of contributing to the creation of Tornado Cash, a smart contract system meant to improve Ethereum transaction anonymity.
According to a Friday story from Unchained, the plan aimed to help Storm and Pertsev pay for their legal fees. Roman Semenov, a third cofounder who was also indicted, is still at large. But by March 8th evening, the suggestion post had vanished from Arbitrum’s conversation forum. It’s still unclear why exactly it was removed and what happened in the sequence of events that led up to it.
Arbitrum DAO Pulls Support For WeWantJusticeDAO’s Legal Fundraiser
The Block was also informed by an Arbitrum representative that the proposal was removed at the author’s request. The removed proposal called for the committed contributions, which totaled about $10,000 per month, to support WeWantJusticeDAO’s crowd-funding campaign in order to help Storm and Pertsev with their significant legal bills. As stated in the proposal documents, the proposed tokens were to be housed on Juicebox, a platform dedicated to cryptocurrency-focused fundraising.
According to a person with knowledge of the matter, members of ArbitrumDAO are actively looking into other ways to pay for the developers’ legal defense in the Tornado Cash project, even after the original plan was removed.
The source claims that funding Coin Centre, a well-known non-profit committed to advocating for Bitcoin legislation, is one possible course of action that is currently being discussed. Furthermore, another insider told The Block that an updated version of the proposal will appear on ArbitrumDAO’s forum some time next week.
The decentralized finance (DeFi) community has shown the developers a great deal of support since their arrests. As a large part of the cryptocurrency market, DeFi is distinguished by its dedication to the values of financial liberty and innovation, which are quite similar to the values of Tornado Cash and its founders.