{"id":39654,"date":"2025-07-30T21:32:06","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T21:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=39654"},"modified":"2025-07-30T21:32:06","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T21:32:06","slug":"jury-set-to-begin-deliberations-as-roman-storms-money-laundering-trial-draws-to-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=39654","title":{"rendered":"Jury Set to Begin Deliberations as Roman Storm\u2019s Money Laundering Trial Draws to Close"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0A Manhattan jury will soon begin their deliberations in Roman Storm\u2019s trial, deciding whether the Tornado Cash developer is guilty of helping hackers and other cyber criminals launder more than $1 billion in dirty money.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in the day, the jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and Storm\u2019s defense team, who each spent hours talking to the jury attempting to re-frame and contextualize the evidence elicited via witness testimony over the past three weeks of trial. Each side\u2019s summation largely followed the shape of their overall cases.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Prosecutors attempted to paint Storm and his co-founders as willing participants in a criminal conspiracy to launder money for bad actors (including for North Korean hackers). They knew criminals were using their platform, prosecutors said, because they got dozens and dozens of emails from victims begging for help. They either didn\u2019t respond to those emails, or they sent them a stock response telling the victims they weren\u2019t able to retrieve their money because the Tornado Cash pools were immutable \u2014\u00a0a response prosecutors described as a \u201cscript full of lies.\u201d Though the pools were immutable (a fact that expert witnesses on both sides agreed on), Storm and his co-workers had full control of Tornado Cash\u2019s user interface and regularly made changes to it. Thus, prosecutors argued, they could have, if they wanted to, made changes that would have dissuaded hackers from using it, such as implementing a user registry that kept records of Tornado Cash\u2019s transaction data. Because they didn\u2019t, prosecutors said, Storm and his colleagues knew they were building a tool for hackers, calling Tornado Cash\u2019s privacy applications a mere \u201ccover story\u201d for the real purpose: making loads of money off criminals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>When it was the defense\u2019s turn for closing arguments, Storm\u2019s lawyers pushed back against the government\u2019s narrative, pointing out numerous instances where the prosecution had cherry-picked data, text messages and other important evidence to make Storm and his co-founders look bad. For example, prosecutors said in their closing arguments that Storm knew Tornado Cash was doing something bad, because he lied to his bank about what he was doing on a routine business account survey. But Storm\u2019s lawyers told the jury that prosecutors had left off an entire section of answers on Storm\u2019s answer to the bank, where he told them he was working on a decentralized finance (DeFi) project, that his company had crypto investments, and that it received money from Gitcoin, a crypto funding platform. Storm, his lawyers said, didn\u2019t think he was doing anything illegal in building Tornado Cash \u2014\u00a0it was developed out in the open, spun out of a 2019 ETHBoston hackathon project, that attracted interest from legitimate investors.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis [wasn\u2019t] happening in some back alley somewhere\u201d said David Patton, a partner at Hecker Fink and a lawyer for Storm.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Tornado Cash, Storm\u2019s lawyers said, was developed to fulfil a real and important need for privacy in the Ethereum community. For them to have implemented a user registry that tracked user\u2019s transactions and personal information \u2014\u00a0a \u201csolution\u201d floated by the prosecution\u2019s expert witness Philip Werlau that he said could have stopped hackers from using the platform \u2014\u00a0may have dissuaded hackers, but it also would have completely defeated the privacy-preserving purposes Tornado Cash was created to solve in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s easy for the prosecution\u2026to Monday morning quarterback,\u201d Patton said. \u201c\u2018You should have done something different, we think you should have made it more like Google or Spotify\u2026the software wasn\u2019t illegal. He wasn\u2019t required to shut it down or change the front end.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Patton rejected the prosecution\u2019s idea that Storm was therefore complicit in criminal activity because he didn\u2019t voluntarily make changes to make his product less attractive to criminals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s such a leap,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Storm has been charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions \u2014\u00a0charges for which, if convicted on all counts, he faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>At the time of publication, the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is charging the jury before releasing the group to begin deliberating.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK \u2014\u00a0A Manhattan jury will soon begin their deliberations in Roman Storm\u2019s trial, deciding whether the Tornado Cash developer is guilty of helping hackers and other cyber criminals launder more than $1 billion in dirty money. Earlier in the day, the jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and Storm\u2019s defense team, who each [&hellip;]<\/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-39654","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\/39654","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=39654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}