New York – Roman Storm, Tornado Cash Developer, who was litigation in Manhattan on charges that the privacy tool he created helped hackers and other cyber criminal laundering of more than $ 1 billion in penalties, will not take the stand, his lawyers said the court on Tuesday.
Storm told District Judge Katherine Polk Failla from the US district court in the southern district of New York (SDNY) that he was aware that he had the right to testify in his own defense, but chose not to do so. After Storm made his decision, his defense team rested, led by Keri Axel and Brian Klein from Waymaker LLP, their case on Tuesday afternoon.
Over the course of three days of testimony, the defense claimed that Storm was only the developer of a legitimate privacy tool that was sometimes exploited by bad actors-something that he and his co-founders could do a little to actually stop because Tornado Cash Protocol and its pools were unchangeable. While Storm and the other Tornado-Cash-with-founders made money on the sale of cracked tokens, they did not deserve directly from Tornado Cash, witnessed witnesses. And although prosecutors tried to produce storm and his co-founders as indifferent-enda unclear to the situation of hackoffer whose money was laundered through Tornado cash, testimony, group cats and messages showed that Storm and his co-founders were dissatisfied with hackers using their platform.
In messages between Storm and his co -founder, Roman Semenov (who also face the same charges and remains in the big in the chat discussed storm and semenov to add Hackers’ wallet to Tornado Cash User Interface’s blocked list.
“We are urgently needed to tell everyone that we do not want these people ahead,” Storm told Semenov.
In another series of messages after the Ronin Bridge -Hack, Storm told Semenov that the hackers’ use of Tornado cash was “very serious.”
After the 2022 hack of Harmony Horizon Bridge, where some revenue flowed through Tornado Cash, Storm – Announcements with Haseeb Qureshi, said CEO of Crypto Venture Capital Firm Dragonfly Capital, investing almost $ 1 million in Tornado Cash Parent PepperSec Inc. – “I’m glad those fuckers are registered.”
Value of privacy
Storm’s defense provoked testimony that there are detailed non-criminal reasons why someone might want to use a tool like Tornado Cash to separate their identity from their financial transactions.
Dr. Matthew Green, famous cryptographic expert and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said Tuesday that the lack of privacy was a “bug” in most of Cryptocurrencies who exposed users to threats from hackers and other attackers.
Green – who offered its expert wine services to Storm’s defense for free – explained that a tool like Tornado Cash, Ethereum users postpone sensitive personal information with each transaction, including how much money they have, what they spend it on and who they associate with. This presents a number of security risks, including phishing attempts, fraud and personal “screw key attacks”, which Green explained has “accelerated” in recent years.
Next step
Whether the jury will sit with the prosecutor’s view of Tornado Contents or the Defense has not yet been decided.
Tomorrow, both sides have a chance to summarize their arguments when closing statements to the jury, after which the jury will be instructed by the judge of the charges against storm and then released into consciousness.
