• Virgil Griffith was a former developer of (ETH), and has been sentenced for 63 months.
• Griffith must also pay $100,000 in fines
• All this happened after he participated in a conference that helped North Korea use blockchain technology to avoid economic sanctions from the United States.

Virgil Griffith was a former Ethereum developer and has been sentenced at the age of 63 to prison. A $100,000 fine will be imposed on Griffith for his participation in a conference that helped North Korea use blockchain technology to escape economic sanctions.

Kevin Castel (the District Judge for the Southern District of New York) handed down his decision Tuesday, April 12. Judge Castel stated that it is evident that the efforts to violate the sanctions were intentional and deliberate, and added that the magnitude of the crime was raised by the fact that Griffith has a “desire to educate people on how to evade sanctions.”

In September 2021, Griffith pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This is a law that bans U.S. citizens from exporting “goods, services or technology to the DPRK (North Korea) without a license from the Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).”

Griffith traveled to Pyongyang in April 2019 for the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference. However, Griffith did not receive permission from the U.S. to travel to North Korea that year.

Griffith presented at the conference on how the country can avoid sanctions and laundering money with cryptocurrencies. In addition, Griffith presented methods for how smart contracts might be of benefit to the country during nuclear arms negotiations with the U.S.

Griffith’s defense team tried to lower his sentence by providing evidence of factors that may have caused him to act irrationally, presenting a psychological assessment of Griffith that indicated that he suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

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