New York – The Government officially rested its case against the Tornado cash developer Roman Storm on Thursday, coming to an end of eight days of testimony of testimony.
Storm’s defense presented his first witness, Ethereum Core developer, Preston Van Loon, on Thursday afternoon. Van Loon told the jury that he was a Cash Tornado user, describing him as a privacy tool for Ethereum that allowed people to separate their identities from their money. Van Loon explained that he had used the protocol for “operational safety and personal security” to protect themselves from computer pirates and other unknown adversaries. Van Loon, who sued the United States Department of the Treasury for sanctioning Tornado’s cash and won, which caused the sanctions to be reversed, did not testify about his related demand, that the United States District Judge, Katherine Polk Failla, prohibited being discussed in the trial.
Van Loon’s testimony was the first taste of Storm’s defense case, which will argue that Tornado Cash was first and foremost a privacy tool that satisfied a legitimate need in the Ethereum community, and that was also exploited by the bad actors. In this way, the defense has argued, Tornado Cash is similar to an application of encrypted messaging or a virtual private network (VPN) or even a hammer, which Storm’s lawyer, Keri Axel, a partner of Waymaker LLP LLP said in his opening statements, could be used for legitimate purposes and break in a home.
Defense witnesses, whose testimony extends for three days of judgment, will try to undo the storm portrait painted by the Prosecutor’s Office during their case.
The case of the Prosecutor’s Office is essentially this: Roman Storm, along with their colleagues and alleged co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, possessed and controlled Tornado’s cash. They benefited generously through their sale of torn tokens. They knew that criminals, including computer pirates of North Korea, sometimes used the protocol to wash the funds. They made frequent changes in the front, or the tornado cash user interface, and they could also change the nature of the protocol itself to make it less attractive to criminals, but they did not. And when the victims of hacks and scams approached Tornado Cash asking for help, Storm told them that he could do nothing for them, what the government said that Thursday was a lie.
This, the government has argued, constitutes a trio of conspiracies: conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit an evasion of sanctions and conspiracy to violate international sanctions, charges for which the storm, if convicted, faces up to 45 years in prison.
Meanwhile, the defense has maintained that Storm did not participate in any conspiracy because he did not know the criminals who used their software, did not give them the green light to use it or benefit from their criminal acts. At most, his lawyers told the judge on Thursday that he was negligent, but not criminally responsible for the behavior of the worst users of Cash.
Expert witness (?)
Through the testimony of several “victims” witnesses, as well as hacking perpetrators, the Prosecutor’s Office told the jury how criminal income flowed through tornadoes and then disappeared.
But a witness, a victim of a WhatsApp scam of erroneous number called Hanfeng Lin, who lost $ 250,000 for a pork butcher operation, previously testified in the Storm trial that a cryptography tracking company called Payback drew a part of his tornado cash. During the weekend, however, Blockchain Taylor Monahan detective (also known as @tayvano_x) led X to explain that recovery and, therefore, the government had been wrong. Lin’s money, he said, never went to Tornado Cash, an affirmation that other well -respected blockchain tracer, including the pseudonyms of blockchain Zachxbt, also verified.
The alleged tracking error led the defense to raise the possibility of a null judgment, or at least the blow of Lin’s testimony. However, Failla ruled that another of the prosecutor’s witnesses, the Internal Revenue Service Agent (IRS), Stephan George, would be allowed to verify that Lin’s funds really flowed through Tornado’s cash, annulling the objection of the defense to the introduction of George as an expert witness.
George, an expert witness for the first time, testified that he used an accounting principle called “Lifo” (last, first to leave) to track Lin’s funds. He admitted, after the interrogation, that the tracking method does not establish the property or attribution of wallets or funds and does not prove that Lin scammers move their money through tornado cash.
During his interrogation by Axel, George also admitted that he was not sure if the torn tokens were “a totally different token than eth”, saying: “It is not a factor that I have to navigate regularly in my work.” When asked if he knew what Crypto.com was (the exchange from which the victim’s funds originated), the expert replied: “I have not looked at Crypto.com and what could be.”
Next steps
Through its own witnesses, the defense will try to delay some of the characterizations and accusations made by the Prosecutor’s Office. On Friday, the defense will call an expert witness, as well as the Professor of the Columbia Business School, Omid Malekan, who will testify about its use of tornado cash.
