New York – A Manhattan jury will soon start its deliberations in the Roman Storm trial, deciding whether Tornado Cash developer is guilty of helping pirates and other cybercriminals to whiten more than a billion dollars in dirty money.
Earlier in the day, the jurors heard arguments of closing prosecutors and the defense team of Storm, who each spent hours speaking to the jury to try to reframe and contextualize the evidence caused by the testimony of witnesses during the last three weeks of trial. The summation of each party has largely followed the shape of its overall cases.
Prosecutors tried to paint Storm and his co-founders as a voluntary participants in a criminal plot to whiten money for bad players (including for North Korean pirates). They knew that criminals used their platform, prosecutors said because they received dozens and dozens of victims’ email begging aid. They did not respond to these emails, either they sent them an answer in shares indicating to the victims that they had not been able to recover their money because the Tornado cash basins were immutable – a response prosecutor described as a “script full of lies”. Although the swimming pools were immutable (a fact that the expert witnesses on both sides were satisfied), Storm and his colleagues had total control of the Tornado Cash user interface and regularly made changes. Thus, the prosecutors argued that they could, if they wanted to make changes which would have dissuaded pirates from using it, such as the implementation of a register of users which held records of the transaction data of Tornado Cash. Because they did not do so, said prosecutors, Storm and his colleagues knew that they were building a tool for pirates, calling Tornado Cash confidentiality applications a simple “coverage story” for real purposes: to earn a lot of money with criminals.
When it was the defense to close the arguments, Storm lawyers postponed the government’s account, highlighting many cases where the accusation had data, text messages and other important evidence to make the storm and its co-founders. For example, the prosecutors said in their closing arguments that Storm knew that Tornado Cash was doing something wrong, because he had lied to his bank on what he was doing in a routine account account survey. But Storm lawyers told the jury that the prosecutors had left an entire response on Storm’s response to the bank, where he told them that he was working on a decentralized financing project (DEFI), that his business had investments in crypto and that he had received money from Gitcoin, a cryptographic financing platform. Storm, said his lawyers, did not think he was doing something illegal in Tornado’s cash construction – he was developed outdoors, out of an ethboston 2019 hackathon project, which aroused the interest of legitimate investors.
“This [wasn’t] Performing in an alley somewhere, “said David Patton, partner of Hecker Fink and Storm lawyer.
Tornado Cash, said Storm lawyers, has been developed to meet a real and important need for private life in the Ethereum community. In order for them to have implemented a register of users who followed the user’s transactions and personal information – a “solution” floated by the witness expert in the accusation Philip Werlau who, according to him, could have prevented the pirates from using the platform – may have dissuaded pirates, but it would also have been completely beaten the preservation of confidentiality, Tornado Cash was created to resolve in first place.
“It’s easy for the accusation … at the quarter of Monday morning,” said Patton. “” You should have done something different, we think you should have done more like Google or Spotify … The software was not illegal. He was not required to close it or change the front. “”
Patton rejected the idea of the accusation that Storm was therefore an accomplice of criminal activities 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 charged with a conspiracy charm in order to commit money laundering, a conspiracy in sight to exploit a business transmission company without license and conspiracy to violate international sanctions – charges, which, if it is sentenced to all the counts, risks a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.
At the time of the publication, the judge supervising the case, the American district judge Katherine Polk Failla, of the South District of New York (SDNY), instructs the jury before freeing the group to start deliberating.
