NEW YORK — A Manhattan jury will soon begin their deliberations in Roman Storm’s trial, deciding whether the Tornado Cash developer is guilty of helping hackers and other cyber criminals launder more than $1 billion in dirty money.
Earlier in the day, the jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and Storm’s defense team, who each spent hours talking to the jury attempting to re-frame and contextualize the evidence elicited via witness testimony over the past three weeks of trial. Each side’s summation largely followed the shape of their overall cases.
Prosecutors attempted to paint Storm and his co-founders as willing participants in a criminal conspiracy to launder money for bad actors (including for North Korean hackers). They knew criminals were using their platform, prosecutors said, because they got dozens and dozens of emails from victims begging for help. They either didn’t respond to those emails, or they sent them a stock response telling the victims they weren’t able to retrieve their money because the Tornado Cash pools were immutable — a response prosecutors described as a “script full of lies.” Though the pools were immutable (a fact that expert witnesses on both sides agreed on), Storm and his co-workers had full control of Tornado Cash’s user interface and regularly made changes to it. Thus, prosecutors argued, they could have, if they wanted to, made changes that would have dissuaded hackers from using it, such as implementing a user registry that kept records of Tornado Cash’s transaction data. Because they didn’t, prosecutors said, Storm and his colleagues knew they were building a tool for hackers, calling Tornado Cash’s privacy applications a mere “cover story” for the real purpose: making loads of money off criminals.
When it was the defense’s turn for closing arguments, Storm’s lawyers pushed back against the government’s narrative, pointing out numerous instances where the prosecution had cherry-picked data, text messages and other important evidence to make Storm and his co-founders look bad. For example, prosecutors said in their closing arguments that Storm knew Tornado Cash was doing something bad, because he lied to his bank about what he was doing on a routine business account survey. But Storm’s lawyers told the jury that prosecutors had left off an entire section of answers on Storm’s answer to the bank, where he told them he was working on a decentralized finance (DeFi) project, that his company had crypto investments, and that it received money from Gitcoin, a crypto funding platform. Storm, his lawyers said, didn’t think he was doing anything illegal in building Tornado Cash — it was developed out in the open, spun out of a 2019 ETHBoston hackathon project, that attracted interest from legitimate investors.
“This [wasn’t] happening in some back alley somewhere” said David Patton, a partner at Hecker Fink and a lawyer for Storm.
Tornado Cash, Storm’s lawyers said, was developed to fulfil a real and important need for privacy in the Ethereum community. For them to have implemented a user registry that tracked user’s transactions and personal information — a “solution” floated by the prosecution’s expert witness Philip Werlau that he said could have stopped hackers from using the platform — may have dissuaded hackers, but it also would have completely defeated the privacy-preserving purposes Tornado Cash was created to solve in the first place.
“It’s easy for the prosecution…to Monday morning quarterback,” Patton said. “‘You should have done something different, we think you should have made it more like Google or Spotify…the software wasn’t illegal. He wasn’t required to shut it down or change the front end.”
Patton rejected the prosecution’s idea that Storm was therefore complicit in criminal activity because he didn’t voluntarily make changes to make his product less attractive to criminals.
“That’s such a leap,” he said.
Storm has been charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to violate international sanctions — charges for which, if convicted on all counts, he faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.
At the time of publication, the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is charging the jury before releasing the group to begin deliberating.