New York – Roman Storm, the cash tornado developer remains in trial in Manhattan for charges that the privacy tool he created helped the computer pirates and other cybercriminals to wash more than $ 1 billion in criminal income, they will not take the position, his lawyers told the court on Tuesday.
Storm told the Katherine Polk Failla district judge of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) that he was aware that he had the right to testify in his own defense, but decided not to do so. After Storm made his decision, his defense team, led by Keri Axel and Brian Klein from Waymaker LLP, rested his case on Tuesday afternoon.
For three days of witness testimony, the defense argued that Storm was simply the developer of a legitimate privacy tool that was sometimes exploited by bad actors, something that he and his co -founders could do little to stop, because the tornado protocol in cash and his pools were immutable. While Storm and the other co -founders of Tornado Cash earned money with the sale of torn tokens, they did not benefit directly from Tornado Cash, witnesses testified. And, although prosecutors tried to portray Storm and his co -founders as indifferent, even insensitive, to the difficult situation of piracy victims whose money was washed through the cash of tornadoes, testimonies of witnesses, group chats and messages showed that Storm and their co -founders were not happy with the computer pirates who used their platform.
In the messages between Storm and his co -founder, Roman Semenov (which also faces the same positions and remains in general), Storm expressed concern following the large hacks, including Ronin Bridge’s trick 2022, in which North Korea computer pirates stole $ 600 million and channeled a part of the profits through Tornado Cash. In the Chat, Storm and Semenov they discussed adding the wallet of the computer pirates to the blocked list of the cash user interface.
“We urgently need to tell everyone that we do not want these people to be in front,” Storm told the Lesnov.
In another message chain after the Ronin bridge trick, Storm told the Lesnov that the use of tornado cash hackers was “very serious.”
After the 2022 trick of the Harizon Horizon bridge, in which some income flowed through the tornado cash, storm, messages with Haseb Qureshi, managing partner of the Risk Capital firm of Crypto, Dragonfly Capital, which invested almost $ 1 million in Tornado Cash Peppersec Inc., said: “I am glad that those bacches are detected.”
Privacy value
Storm’s defense caused a testimony of witnesses that detail non -criminal reasons why someone could use a Cash Tornado tool to separate their identity from their financial transactions.
Dr. Matthew Green, a renowned cryptography expert and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, the jury said on Tuesday that the lack of privacy was a “error” in most cryptocurrencies, exposing users to the threats of computer pirates and other attackers.
Green, who offered her services as expert witnesses to Storm’s defense for free, explained that, without a tool like Cash Tornado, Ethereum users are exposing confidential personal information with each transaction, including how much money they have, what they spend and with whom they associate. This presents a variety of security risks, including phishing attempts, fraud and “key attacks” in person, which Green explained that they have been “accelerating” in recent years.
Next steps
If the jury will put on the side of the vision of the Tornado Cash Prosecutor’s Office or the defense has not yet been decided.
Tomorrow, both parties will have the opportunity to summarize their arguments in the closing statements to the jury, after which the judge will instruct the judge about charges against Storm and then released to deliberate.
