The Tornado Cash Dev Is Going To Trial
March 26, 2025 at 3:43 PMby The Block Whisperer
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Tornado Cash developer faces trial with potential 45-year sentence despite Treasury lifting platform sanctions.
Roman Storm is headed to court in Manhattan on July 14th, and the entire industry is holding its breath.
The 35-year-old Tornado Cash co-founder could face up to 45 years behind bars if things go sideways.
Storm got nabbed back in August 2023 for allegedly helping launder over $1 billion in stolen crypto.
The feds slapped him with money laundering conspiracy, sanctions violations, and running an unlicensed money business.
Prosecutors are basically saying he knew exactly what Tornado Cash was being used for and didn't care.
North Korea's Lazarus Group – yes, the one under US sanctions – was apparently a big fan of his mixer.
Tornado Cash was just smart contracts on Ethereum that broke the connection between sending and receiving addresses.
You put ETH in, it got mixed with everyone else's, and you pulled "clean" ETH out.
Storm and the team said it was about privacy, not helping criminals.
The government disagrees – strongly.
Matt Huang from Paradigm dropped $1.25 million on Storm's legal defense.
He's comparing this to arresting Tim Cook because criminals use iPhones.
The whole "code is speech" crowd is having a collective meltdown over what this means for developers.
Half the industry thinks Storm is being scapegoated for building neutral tools.
Some Trump allies are saying Storm wouldn't be in this mess if their guy was in charge.
The Justice Department claims they're just enforcing laws, not playing politics.
Meanwhile, the Treasury Department just lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash itself.
Talk about mixed signals—the platform suddenly seems okay, but the developer is still facing decades in prison.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla already shot down Storm's attempt to dismiss the charges.
She wasn't buying the "altruistic privacy tool" argument and said Tornado Cash was a for-profit business.
Storm's lawyers are probably scrambling to figure out how the lifted sanctions affect their case.
This is uncharted legal territory, even by crypto standards.
This case could change everything about how crypto privacy tools get built.
If Storm gets convicted, developers might think twice before coding anything that bad actors could use.
If he walks, it's a massive win for the "code is speech" argument.
Either way, the entire open-source development model might be on trial alongside him.
Roman Storm's future hangs in the balance, and so does a piece of the crypto industry's soul.
This case is about way more than one developer – it's about what we're allowed to build.
On July 14th, we'll start finding out if writing code that protects privacy can result in prison time.
Every privacy coin developer is watching very, very carefully.
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