{"id":38710,"date":"2025-07-25T04:17:50","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T04:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=38710"},"modified":"2025-07-25T04:17:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T04:17:50","slug":"roman-storm-trial-is-coding-a-crime-the-tornado-cash-court-battle-intensifies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=38710","title":{"rendered":"Roman Storm Trial: Is Coding A Crime? The Tornado Cash Court Battle Intensifies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0The government officially rested its case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on Thursday, bringing eight days of witness testimony to a close.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Storm\u2019s defense introduced its first witness, Ethereum core developer Preston Van Loon, on Thursday afternoon. Van Loon told the jury that he was a user of Tornado Cash, describing it as a privacy tool for Ethereum that allowed people to separate their identities from their money. Van Loon explained that he\u2019d used the protocol for \u201coperational security and personal safety\u201d to protect himself from hackers and other unknown adversaries. Van Loon \u2014\u00a0who sued the U.S. Treasury Department for sanctioning Tornado Cash and won<\/a>, leading to the sanctions being reversed \u2014\u00a0did not testify about his related lawsuit, which U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla banned from being discussed<\/a> at trial.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Van Loon\u2019s testimony was the first taste of Storm\u2019s defense case, which will argue that Tornado Cash was first and foremost a privacy tool that met a legitimate need in the Ethereum community \u2014\u00a0and that also happened to be exploited by bad actors. In that way, the defense has argued, Tornado Cash is similar to an encrypted messaging app or a virtual private network (VPN) or even a hammer \u2014\u00a0which Storm\u2019s lawyer Keri Axel, a partner at Waymaker LLP pointed out in her opening statements, could both be used for legitimate purposes as well as breaking into a home.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The defense\u2019s witnesses, whose testimony is expected to stretch over three trial days, will attempt to undo the portrait of Storm painted by the prosecution over the course of their case.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The prosecution\u2019s case is, essentially, this: Roman Storm, along with his colleagues and alleged co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, owned and controlled Tornado Cash. They profited handsomely from it through their sale of TORN tokens. They knew that criminals, including North Korean hackers, were sometimes using the protocol to launder funds. They made frequent changes to the front end, or user interface of Tornado Cash, and were also thus able to change the nature of the protocol itself to make it less attractive to criminals, but didn\u2019t. And when victims of hacks and scams reached out to Tornado Cash asking for help, Storm told them he couldn\u2019t do anything for them, which the government claimed Thursday was a lie.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This, the government has argued, constitutes a trio of conspiracies: conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions evasion, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions \u2014\u00a0charges for which Storm, if convicted, faces up to 45 years in prison.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The defense, meanwhile, has maintained that Storm didn\u2019t participate in any conspiracies because he didn\u2019t know the criminals using his software, didn\u2019t give them the green-light to use it or otherwise profit from their criminal acts. At most, his lawyers told the judge on Thursday, he was negligent, but not criminally responsible for the behavior of Tornado Cash\u2019s worst users.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Expert (?) witness<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Through the testimony of several \u201cvictim\u201d witnesses as well as hack perpetrators, the prosecution told the jury how criminal proceeds flowed through Tornado Cash and then disappeared.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But one witness \u2014\u00a0a victim of a wrong-number WhatsApp scam named Hanfeng Lin, who lost $250,000 to a pig butchering operation \u2013\u00a0testified earlier in Storm\u2019s trial that a crypto tracing company called Payback traced a portion of her money to Tornado Cash. Over the weekend, however, blockchain sleuth Taylor Monahan (aka @tayvano_x) took to X to explain<\/a> that Payback, and thus the government, had gotten the tracing wrong. Lin\u2019s money, she said, never went to Tornado Cash \u2014\u00a0a claim that other well-respected blockchain tracers, including pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, also verified.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The alleged tracing error led the defense to raise the possibility of a mistrial, or at least the striking of Lin\u2019s testimony. However, Failla ruled that another of the prosecution\u2019s witnesses \u2014 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent Stephan George \u2014\u00a0would be allowed to verify that Lin\u2019s funds indeed flowed through Tornado Cash, overruling the defense\u2019s objection to George\u2019s introduction as an expert witness.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

George, a first-time expert witness, testified that he used an accounting principle called \u201cLIFO\u201d (last in, first out) to trace Lin\u2019s funds. He admitted, upon cross-examination, that the method of tracing does not establish the ownership or attribution of the wallets or funds and does not prove that Lin\u2019s scammers moved her money through Tornado Cash.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

During his cross-examination by Axel, George also admitted that he was unsure whether TORN tokens were \u201ca totally different token than ETH,\u201d saying, \u201cIt\u2019s not a factor that I have to regularly navigate in my work.\u201d When asked if he knew what Crypto.com<\/a> (the exchange from which the victim\u2019s funds originated) was, the expert replied: \u201cI have not looked into Crypto.com<\/a> and what it could be.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Next steps<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Through their own witnesses, the defense will attempt to roll back some of the characterizations and allegations made by the prosecution. On Friday, the defense will call an expert witness as well as Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan, who will testify about his use of Tornado Cash.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0The government officially rested its case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on Thursday, bringing eight days of witness testimony to a close. Storm\u2019s defense introduced its first witness, Ethereum core developer Preston Van Loon, on Thursday afternoon. Van Loon told the jury that he was a user of Tornado Cash, describing it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-38710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}