NEW YORK — Roman Storm, a standing trial for tornado cash developers in Manhattan, Roman Storm, has accused the privacy tools he created of helping hackers and other cybercriminals wash more than $1 billion in criminal income, his lawyer told the court on Tuesday.
Storm told District Judge Katherine Polk Faira of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) that she knew she had the right to testify in her defense, but she chose not to. After Storm made his decision, his defense team, led by Keri Axel and Brian Klein of Waymaker LLP, put their case on Tuesday afternoon.
Over three days of witness testimony, the defense argued that Storm was simply the developer of a legitimate privacy tool that is exploited by bad actors. He and his co-founders were hardly able to stop. Storm and other tornado cash co-founders testified that they made money from selling torn tokens, but they didn’t directly benefit from tornado cash. Prosecutors then tried to portray Storm and his co-founder as indifferent to the light-formation of hack victims whose money was washed through tornado cash, witness testimony, group chats and messages, but Storm and his co-founder were shown to be using the platform to be unhappy with the hackers.
In a message between Storm and his co-founder Roma Semenov (who also faces the same accusations and remains massive), Storm raised concerns in the wake of major hacks, including the 2022 hack of Ronin Bridge, in which North Korean hackers stole $600 million and raised revenues through Trnado Cash. In the chat, Storm and Semenov discussed adding hacker wallets to the block list on the Tornado Cash User Interface.
“We need to urgently tell everyone that we don’t want these individuals in front of us,” Storm told Semenov.
In another series of messages following the Ronin Bridge Hack, Storm told Semenov that hackers’ use of Tornado Cash was “very serious.”
After a 2022 Harmony Horizon Bridge hack, some revenue flows through tornado cash – a message with Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Crypto Venture Capital Firm Dragonfly Capital.
The value of privacy
Storm’s defense elicited witness testimony detailing the non-criminal reasons someone might want to use tools like Tornado Cash to separate their identity from financial transactions.
Dr. Matthew Green, a well-known cryptographic expert at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of computer science, told the ju judge on Tuesday that the lack of privacy was a “bug” for most of the cryptocurrency, putting users under threat from hackers and other attackers.
Greene – who provided expert witness services for the defense of the Storm for free – explained that without a tool like Tornado Cash, Ethereum users are releasing personal information that is sensitive to all transactions, including how much money they have, what they spend, who they relate to. This presents a variety of security risks, including phishing attempts, fraud, and the “wrench attacks” described by Green.
Next Steps
Will the ju apprentice be on the side of the prosecutor’s views on tornado cash, or whether the defense has not yet been decided.
Tomorrow, both sides will have the opportunity to summarise their arguments when closing the ju judge’s statement, after which the ju judge will be directed by the judge regarding the charges against Storm and then released for deliberation.
