NEW YORK – A Manhattan ju judge will soon begin deliberation at the Rome Storm trial to decide whether tornado cash developers are guilty of helping hackers and other cybercriminals wash more than a billion dollars of dirty money.
Earlier that day, the ju judge heard closing discussions from both the prosecutor and the Storm’s defense team. Each spoke with the ju apprentice to reshape and contextualize the evidence that was elicited through witness testimony over the past three weeks of trials. The sum of each side continued primarily in the overall case shape.
The prosecutors tried to portray Arashi and his co-founder as an aspiring participant in a criminal conspiracy to wash off money for bad actors (including North Korean hackers). They knew that criminals were using their platform, prosecutors said it was because they had received dozens of emails from victims seeking help. They either did not respond to those emails or sent stock responses informing the victim that they were unable to retrieve the money because the tornado’s cash pool was constant. The pool was unchanging (the fact that expert witnesses on both sides agreed), but Storm and his colleagues had full control of the Tornado Cash’s user interface and changed it regularly. Therefore, prosecutors argued that if hackers discouraged them from using it, such as implementing a user registry that keeps a record of transaction data in Tornado Cash, they had, if they wanted. Storm and his colleagues knew they were building tools for hackers, calling the Tornado Cash privacy application a mere “cover story” for real purposes, prosecutors said.
When it was the defence order that concluded the debate, Storm’s lawyers opposed the government’s narrative, pointing to many instances in which prosecutors had Cherry Pick’s data, text messages and other important evidence to make Storm and his co-founder look bad. For example, prosecutors said in their final argument that Storm knew that Tornado’s cash was doing something bad, that it was because he lied to his bank about what he was doing in his daily business account investigations. However, Storm’s lawyer told the ju judge that the prosecutor had ruled out the entire section of responses regarding Storm’s banks, where he told him he was working on a distributed finance (DEFI) project, and that his company was making crypto investments and received money from Gitcoin, a Crypto Funding platform. His lawyers said Storm didn’t think he was doing anything illegal when building cash for the tornado. It was developed openly, spun from the 2019 Esboston Hackathon project and attracted attention from legitimate investors.
“This wasn’t happening anywhere in the Back Alley,” said David Patton, Heckerfink’s partner and Storm’s lawyer.
According to a Storm lawyer, Tornado Cash was developed to meet the true and important needs of privacy in the Ethereum community. In order to implement a user registry that tracks user transactions and personal information, a “solution” emerged by prosecutor expert Philip Verlau said that hackers may have stopped using the platform, but that they may have abolished the hackers, but would have completely defeated the purpose of claiming privacy created in the first place.
“It’s easy for the prosecutors… for the quarterback on Monday morning,” Patton said. “‘You should have done something different. I think you should have done something like Google or Spotify. The software wasn’t illegal. He didn’t have to shut it down or change the frontend.”
Patton rejected the prosecution’s idea that the storm was conspiring in criminal acts.
“It’s a huge leap,” he said.
Storm was charged with one conspiracy: committing money laundering, conspiracy to run an unlicensed money transfer business, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions.
At the time of publication, the judge oversees the case and indicts jury judges before the review begins.
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