New York – A Jury in Manhattan will soon begin their considerations in Roman Storm’s trial and decide whether Tornado Cash Developer is guilty of helping hackers and other cyber criminal money laundering more than $ 1 billion in dirty money.
Earlier in the day, the jury leaders heard final arguments from both prosecutors and Storm’s defense team, each spent hours talking to the jury trying to restore and contextualize the evidence evoked through testimony in the last three weeks of trial. Each side’s summary largely followed the shape of their overall cases.
Prosecutors tried 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 used their platform, prosecutors said because they got dozens and dozens of e emails from victims praying for help. They either did not respond to these e emails, or they sent them a stock response that told the victims that they were unable to retrieve their money because Tornado -Contant pools were unchanging -a prosecutor who was described as a “script full of lies.” Although the pools were unchangeable (a fact that expert vitner on both sides agreed), Storm and his staff had full control of Tornado Cash’s UI and regularly changed it. Prosecutors thus claimed that, if they wanted to have, they made changes that would have deterred hackers from using it, such as implementing a user register that kept items over Tornado Cash’s transaction data. Because they didn’t, prosecutors, Storm and his colleagues knew they built a tool for hackers, and called Tornado Cash’s privacy applications merely “cover history” for the real purpose: to make lots of money on criminals.
When it was the defense turn to close arguments, Storm’s lawyers pushed back to the government’s narrative, pointing out several cases where the prosecution had cherry -picked data, text messages and other important evidence of making 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 in a routine business account investigation. But Storms Attorneys told the jury that prosecutors had left a whole section of the answers to Storm’s response to the bank, where he told them he was working on a decentralized financing project (DEFI) that his company had Crypto investments and that it received money from Gitcoin, a Crypto financing platform. Storm, said his lawyers, didn’t think he was doing anything illegal in building Tornado cash – it was developed out in the open, spun out of a 2019 Ethboston Hackathon project that attracted interest from legitimate investors.
“This [wasn’t] To happen in some rear spawning somewhere, ”said David Patton, a partner at Hecker Fink and a storm lawyer.
Tornado Cash, said Storm’s lawyers, were developed to meet a real and important need for privacy in the Ethereum community. In order for them to have implemented a user register that tracks the user’s transactions and personal information-a “solution” fled by the prosecutor’s expert vitner Philip Werlau, which he said could have prevented hackers from using the platform-can have deterred hackers, but it would also have defeated privacy to have Tornado quotes that were set up to solve in the first place.
“It’s easy for the prosecution … for Monday morning quarterback,” Patton said. “‘You should have done something else, we think you should have done it more like Google or Spotify … The software wasn’t illegal. He wasn’t obliged to shut it down or change the front end.”
Patton rejected the prosecutor’s idea that Storm was therefore an accomplice in criminal activity because he did not voluntarily make changes to make his product less attractive to criminals.
“It’s such a jump,” he said.
Storm has been indicted for a counting each of the conspiracy of committing money laundering, conspiracy to run an unlicensed money that transfers business, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions – charges for which, if convicted in all counts, is subjected to a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.
At the time of the publication, the judge is accusing the case, the US district judge Katherine Polk Failla from the southern district of New York (SDNY) jury before releasing the group to start considering.
