The judge refuses the release on bail of Alexey Pertsev of Tornado Cash who will have to spend 90 days in prison in the Netherlands!

Alexey Pertsev, the developer who was arrested for releasing the open-source code of the Tornado Cash protocol earlier this month, must spend at least another 90 days in jail, a Dutch judge ruled Wednesday.

The Tax Information and Investigation Service announced earlier this month that it had arrested Alexey Pertsev, 29, for his alleged involvement “in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering” via Tornado Cash. Alexey Pertsev was one of many contributors to Tornado Cash’s open source code on Github. His arrest sparked outrage in the crypto-currency community over the legitimacy of the Dutch agency arresting a person for deploying code. The agency said it began investigating Tornado Cash in June.

Alexey Pertsev’s arrest came days after the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash and its associated smart contracts because of its popularity with cybercrime syndicates like Lazarus Group. The Treasury took a similar stance to the Dutch authorities in its statement, saying the protocol had “repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to prevent it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors.“Several key cryptographic protocols and projects, including Alchemy, Infura and Circle, immediately complied with the ban after the announcement.

Alexey Pertsev was denied bail at today’s hearing in Den Bosch. He has not yet been formally charged with any crime, which is part of the reason his arrest has sparked such a reaction among crypto-currency users. Congressman Tom Emmer (R-MN.) spoke out on the issue Tuesday, writing a letter to Treasury asking why it targeted the software. According to Emmer, the penalty represents a “divergence from OFAC’s precedents“.