Virgil Griffith Handed Five-year Sentence For North Korea Trip

• Former Ethereum designer Virgil Griffith has been handed a five-year jail sentence for unlawfully participating in a North Korean blockchain conference
• Griffith offered a discussion at the 2019 Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference
• He was implicated in recommending to the North Korean state how to avert sanctions with crypto

Former Ethereum designer Virgil Griffith has been handed a five-year prison term for assisting North Korea to avert U.S. sanctions. Griffith, 39, pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy the day before his trial in September 2015 and was sentenced the other day, with his five-year spell exercising much better than the 63-78 month term he organized as part of his plea offer. Griffith went to a blockchain conference in Pyongyang in 2019 where he imagined revealing to guests how to avert U.S. sanctions with cryptocurrency.

North Korea Trip Proves Costly

Griffith’s story goes back to April 2019 when he went to the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, despite having been rejected a visa by U.S. authorities to take a trip to the rogue country.

Instead, he smuggled himself in and provided a discussion called ‘Blockchain and Peace’, where he was photographed revealing to guests how they might utilize the innovation he was recommending to avert sanctions.

IEEPA Violation Sends Griffith to Jail

Griffith was detained at Los Angeles National Airport 7 months later on and was charged with conspiring to break the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (” IEEPA”), a charge he at first rejected, right as much as his expected court date in September 2015. The day before his trial was because of the beginning he rather pled guilty to the charge and was the other day sentenced to 5 years in jail for the journey.

Griffith’s lawyer had at first stated that his customer didn’t inform participants absolutely anything they didn’t currently understand, however, he was fretted enough by the capacity for an optimum 20- year sentence if it had gone to trial that he recommended his customer to take the hit.