New York – The government officially submitted its file against the developer of Tornado Cash Roman Storm on Thursday, which ended eight days of witnesses.
The defense of Storm presented its first witness, the developer of Core Ethereum, Preston Van Loon, Thursday afternoon. Van Loon told the jury that he was a user of Tornado Cash, describing him as a confidentiality tool for Ethereum which allowed people to separate their identity from their money. Van Loon explained that he had used the “operational security and personal security” protocol to protect himself from pirates and other unknown opponents. Van Loon – which continued the Department of the US Treasury for sanctioned the tornado money and won, leading to the inversion of sanctions – did not testify on its related trial, that the American district judge Katherine Polk Failla prohibited being discussed at the trial.
Van Loon’s testimony was the first taste for the defense case of Storm, which will affirm that the Tornado Cash was first and foremost a confidentiality tool which responded to a legitimate need in the Ethereum community – and which was also exploited by bad actors. In this way, argued the defense, Tornado Cash is similar to an encrypted messaging application or a virtual private network (VPN) or even a hammer – that Storm lawyer, Keri Axel, partner of Waymaker LLP stressed in his opening statements, could both be used for legitimate purposes as well as in a house.
Defense witnesses, whose testimony should extend over three days of testing, will try to defeat the portrait of the storm painted by the accusation during their case.
The case of the accusation is, essentially, this: Roman Storm, as well as its alleged colleagues and co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pétèsev, detainees of the tornado. They benefited generously with their sale of torn token. They knew that criminals, including the North Korean pirates, sometimes used the protocol to whiten the funds. They made frequent changes to the frontal end or to the user interface of Tornado Cash, and were also able to change the nature of the protocol itself to make it less attractive for criminals, but no. And when the victims of hacks and scams contacted tornado money asking for help, Storm told them that he could do nothing for them, which, according to the government, was a lie.
This has argued the government, constitutes a trio of conspiracies: conspiracy to commit money laundering, a conspiracy to commit escape sanctions and plot to violate international sanctions – accusations for which the storm, if condemned, risks up to 45 years in prison.
The defense, on the other hand, argued that Storm did not participate in any conspiracy because he did not know that the criminals using his software did not give them green light to use it or otherwise take advantage of their criminal acts. At most, his lawyers told the judge on Thursday that he had neglected, but not criminally responsible for the behavior of the worst users of Tornado Cash.
Expert (?) Witness
Thanks to the testimony of several “victims” witnesses as well as the piracy authors, the accusation explained to the jury how the criminal product had crossed the tornado money and then disappeared.
But a witness – a victim of a WhatsApp scam of the bad number named Hanfeng Lin, who lost $ 250,000 against a pork butcher’s operation – said earlier in the Storm trial that an cryptographic tracing company called Payback drew part of his money in Tornado Cash. During the weekend, however, the Blockchain Sleuth Taylor Monahan (alias @tayvano_x) went to X to explain this return on investment, and therefore the government, had gone wrong tracing. Linen money, she said, never went to Tornado Cash-an assertion that other high-respected blockchain tracers, including the pseudonym detective of the Zachxbt blockchain, also verified.
The alleged tracing error led the defense to increase the possibility of a trial, or at least the strike of the testimony of flax. However, Failla judged that another witnesses of the accusation – the agent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Stephan George – would be authorized to verify that the linen funds have effectively crossed the tornado money, canceling the defense objection to the introduction of George as an expert witness.
George, a first expert witness, said that he had used an accounting principle called “LIFO” (last in, first outing) to retrace linen funds. He admitted, during the counter-examination, that the tracing method does not establish the property or the allocation of portfolios or funds and does not prove that flax crooks moved his money via tornado money.
During his axel cross-examination, George also admitted that he was not sure if the torn token were “a totally different token”, saying: “It is not a factor that I have to sail regularly in my work”. When he asked if he knew what Crypto.com was (the exchange from which the victim’s funds are from), the expert replied: “I did not examine Crypto.com and what it could be.”
Following steps
Thanks to their own witnesses, the defense will try to retreat some of the characterizations and allegations made by the accusation. Friday, the defense will call an expert witness as well as the professor of the Columbia Business School Omid Malekan, who will testify on his use of Tornado Cash.
