I’m finally out, safe and free. There was a small moment were things looked very bad but thanks to help from many I got released. Sorry if I didn’t answer every message. I was in calls non stop the last 24 hours with too many people and I only slept two hours. Yesterday I landed in Izmir, Turkey to meet with builders, friends, and local businessmen. We are working on a DeFi project here and I also wanted to meet wine industry people to export our wine here and potentially invest in the country in the near future. I want to emphasize that I love Turkey and the Turkish people. I’m proud to say that some of my closest friends are turkish nowadays. At passport control, the police detained me and said I couldn’t enter the country. They told me I needed to appear before a judge over a case that was opened there. I wasn’t allowed to use my phone, so my assistant reached out to local friends, who then contacted a Turkish attorney. The police warned me they would take my phone and that I would not be able to speak with anyone. After a few hours, the attorney reached me and explained that the Minister of Internal Affairs had filed a case accusing me of helping others misuse @ethereum, allegedly in connection with a privacy protocol. A few years ago, on the day Alexey was detained, we received a call, that gladly didn’t escalate any further, regarding an academic paper and code we had published about Tornado Cash, called Tutela. Our work showed that it was possible to deanonymize users. We never helped anyone engage in illegal activity, it was purely research on mixers and their properties. To be clear: a) We didn’t develop privacy features, only code and a paper showing heuristics to deanonymize users. We did want to work in more areas of Tornado but we couldn’t. b) Even if we had worked on privacy and ZK for a protocol, targeting a software company for makes no sense to me. c) Writing code to make transactions private doesn’t make you a criminal. Criminals are those who break the law. Would anyone jail Linus Torvalds because someone built a missile that uses the Linux kernel? At one point, I was told my belongings would be taken and I would be moved elsewhere until charges were brought. Important friends from the UAE, UK, US, all around European Union, Argentina and the Catholic Church immediately stepped in to help, some contacting senior figures in Turkey to assist, they asked for explanations and supported me. There was a moment where I believe if a few of them didn’t intervene things might have gone sour. Thanks to their intervention I could stay with my phone at all time and now I’m back to Europe. Our local Turkish attorney is already working on our defense. We still don’t have the full picture of what happened or why it happened, but we will bring in the best team we can and resolve this. If needed, one things are sorted out, I will come back to clear my name and defend ourselves. We have great local connections and lawyers. I’m not sure I will be able to tweet about this until we sort things out. In recent months, my team and I experienced several smaller incidents I can’t discuss publicly. The world feels more fractured than just a few years ago, and resources are contested everywhere. Ou companies work at the frontier of cryptography, cybersecurity and AI. With time we will get better and better at we do. Most of what I did was with very little money. Now that we have more resources we can accelerate. I don’t plan on stop any of what we do.