American programmer and developer Virgil Griffith pleaded guilty today to violating U.S. sanctions law. Griffith produced Wikipedia indexing tool WikiScanner, co-designed the Tor2web proxy, and was a senior research study researcher with the Ethereum Foundation who at one point led unique tasks 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, however rather altered his plea to guilty to the only charge. Prior to moving his plea, he was confronting twenty years in jail.
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 optimal sentence even with the plea offer, nevertheless, 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 workplace declared that throughout that talk, he “provided highly technical information” that he understood “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 launched on bail in 2015, nevertheless he was imprisoned after trying to access his Coinbase account to pay lawyers this year. Prosecutors stated that this move was a violation of the terms of his bail conditions.
International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)
Despite not living in the U.S., Griffith was a U.S. resident and therefore based on 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 appropriately notes, because Griffith just dealt with “conspiracy to violate” the IEEPA which really assisting North Korea was not essential to discover 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. individuals are “prohibited from exporting any goods, services, or technology to the DPRK without a license”. The bar to discover Griffith guilty was certainly rather 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 backward and forward in between the U.S. Attorney’s workplace and Virgil’s agents lastly ends.
