Roman Storm Trial: When Coding Becomes a Crime – Tornado Cash Faces Its Day in Court

The crypto world holds its breath as Roman Storm's trial kicks off—a case that could redefine developer liability in DeFi. Is writing code now a criminal act? The DOJ seems to think so.

Subheader: The Privacy Paradox

Tornado Cash—the Ethereum mixer that anonymized $7 billion before sanctions—has become the DOJ's poster child for 'criminal infrastructure.' Storm's defense? He just built the tool. Since when did hammers get blamed for burglaries?

Subheader: Precedent in the Making

Prosecutors allege Storm 'knowingly facilitated' money laundering. Defense counters with First Amendment arguments—code as speech. Meanwhile, VCs who funded Tornado Cash quietly update their compliance decks (and offshore accounts).

Closing Thought: Whether Storm walks or not, this trial already proves one thing—in crypto, you can decentralize the protocol, but you can't decentralize the blame.

Expert (?) witness

Through the testimony of several “victim” witnesses as well as hack perpetrators, the prosecution told the jury how criminal proceeds flowed through Tornado Cash and then disappeared.

But one witness — a victim of a wrong-number WhatsApp scam named Hanfeng Lin, who lost $250,000 to a pig butchering operation – testified earlier in Storm’s trial that a crypto tracing company called Payback traced a portion of her money to Tornado Cash. Over the weekend, however, blockchain sleuth Taylor Monahan (aka @tayvano_x) took to X to explain that Payback, and thus the government, had gotten the tracing wrong. Lin’s money, she said, never went to Tornado Cash — a claim that other well-respected blockchain tracers, including pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, also verified.

The alleged tracing error led the defense to raise the possibility of a mistrial, or at least the striking of Lin’s testimony. However, Failla ruled that another of the prosecution’s witnesses — Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent Stephan George — would be allowed to verify that Lin’s funds indeed flowed through Tornado Cash, overruling the defense’s objection to George’s introduction as an expert witness.

George, a first-time expert witness, testified that he used an accounting principle called “LIFO” (last in, first out) to trace Lin’s funds. He admitted, upon cross-examination, that the method of tracing does not establish the ownership or attribution of the wallets or funds and does not prove that Lin’s scammers moved her money through Tornado Cash.

During his cross-examination by Axel, George also admitted that he was unsure whether TORN tokens were “a totally different token than ETH,” saying, “It’s not a factor that I have to regularly navigate in my work.” When asked if he knew what Crypto.com (the exchange from which the victim’s funds originated) was, the expert replied: “I have not looked into Crypto.com and what it could be.”

Next steps

Through their own witnesses, the defense will attempt to roll back some of the characterizations and allegations made by the prosecution. On Friday, the defense will call an expert witness as well as Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan, who will testify about his use of Tornado Cash.