Former Ethereum Developer Griffith Pleads Guilty To Violating U.S. Sanctions
27 Septiembre 2021 - 12:49PM
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American programmer and developer Virgil Griffith pleaded guilty
today to violating U.S. sanctions law. Griffith created Wikipedia
indexing tool WikiScanner, co-designed the Tor2web proxy, and was a
senior research scientist with the Ethereum Foundation who at one
point led special projects for the platform. The North Korean
Crypto Conference A federal grand jury convened by the U.S.
Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York alleged that
Griffith conspired to allege the International Emergency Economic
Powers Act. Griffith was set to go on trial today, but instead
changed his plea to guilty to the lone charge. Prior to shifting
his plea, he was facing up to 20 years in prison. He will be
sentenced in January 2022, and reports state that the plea deal
could conclude with somewhere between 63 and 78 months of prison
time. The maximum sentence even with the plea deal, however, is
still north of 6 years. Griffith was arrested in November 2019
after allegedly speaking on blockchain and cryptocurrency in North
Korea earlier that year. The U.S. Attorney’s office alleged that
during that talk, he “provided highly technical information” that
he knew “could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade
sanctions.” The event was a “Pyongyang Blockchain and
Cryptocurrency Conference” in April 2019, according to the
Department of Justice press release. Griffith was released on bail
last year, however he was jailed after attempting to access his
Coinbase account to pay attorneys this year. Prosecutors stated
that this move was a violation of the terms of his bail conditions.
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Bitcoin For Ethereum International Emergency Economic Powers Act
(IEEPA) Despite not residing in the U.S., Griffith was a U.S.
citizen and thus subject to the IEEPA charges. Journalist and
author Ethan Lou, who was with Virgil Griffith in North Korea, was
at the courthouse today and tweeted developments. As Lou aptly
notes, since Griffith only faced “conspiracy to violate” the IEEPA
and that actually helping North Korea was not vital to find him
guilty. Accordingly, says Lou, “the prosecution does not need to
prove any tangible results of any specific action.” The IEEPA
states that U.S. persons are “prohibited from exporting any goods,
services, or technology to the DPRK without a license”. The bar to
find Griffith guilty was undoubtedly quite low. Following
Griffith’s plea shift, Lou noted that he was “quite emotional” and
that it was “unclear what new development caused this guilty plea,”
adding that “one possible reason is the barring of the remote
testimony of an Ethereum Foundation lawyer.” The two-year back and
forth between the U.S. Attorney’s office and Virgil’s
representatives finally comes to a close. Related Reading | 2.1
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