Today, during the second day of the Tornado Cash Case, gave the prosecution and defense opposing accounts in their opening declarations for why the defendant in the case, Roman Storm, started Tornado Cash.
These statements were made after the jury selection process was completed.
The jury consists of seven women and five men; Two members of the jury are in the 60s, four in the 40s, one in the 30s and five in their 20s; And eight have undergraduate programs, three have high school degrees and one has a master’s degree.
The members of the jury took the booth right after 7 p.m. 14:00 EST, just before both the prosecution and the defense delivered their opening declarations.
The opening declaration from the prosecution
The prosecution first delivered its opening declaration.
From the prosecution stood Mr. Mosley to the jury and harped on the notion that Storm created Tornado cash with the primary motivation to enrich himself – though it meant to do so by helping white laundering “dirty money.”
Mr. Mosley declared that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto had been stepped up through Tornado cash, and that the storm and his co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, could have made the tornado quits less attractive to criminals, but chose not to do so.
He also quoted how Tornado Cash relieved sanctions as North Korean hackers had used the service to launder crypto funds.
Han antydede, at stormen i sig selv var skyldig, fordi han havde sms-hans medstiftere i tornado kontanter “fyre, vi er færdige for”, da nyhederne dukkede op, at nordkoreanske hackere brugte tornado kontanter til at blande fondene, der blev stjålet fra hacket af online krypto-spil Axie Infinitiy såvel som Storm bar en t-shirt med en vaskemaskine og en tornado Lougo on it for a creeping conference. (The defense admitted in its opening declaration that Storm had such a T-shirt was performed in “Bad Taste.”)
Mr. Mosley also declared that the evidence will show that Storm and his co-conspirators in Tornado Cash intentionally ran a crypto “washing machine” to help money laundering to bad actors and that it is untrue storm, and his fellow conspirators were unable to make changes to the design of tornado contains when they were told that bad actors used it, although they could.
“He chose to launder money time and time again,” Mr. Mosley from Storm.
Mr. Mosley added that Storm tried to “hide his actions” by “paying out” to the tune of millions of dollars using an account that was not his own. (No details of whether this was a bank or crypto exchange account was delivered.)
Finally, Mr. Mosley that the evidence in the case will include encrypted chats about the Tornado Cash business; The accused communication with victims of cryptohacks, the funds that flowed through Tornado cash; And documents showing that Storm used someone else’s account in August 2022 to pay out.
The opening declaration from the defense
Ms. Axel, a member of the defense team, approached the jury after Mr. Mosley.
She began by painting a picture of Storm as a hard -working immigrant with a tendency for computer programming, adding that he has worked for a number of reputable tech companies, including Amazon.
She said Storm created Tornado cash to help solve the problem of financial privacy when shopping on a public blockchain, claiming he had no connection to any of the bad players who used the service.
“The novel had nothing to do with the hacks and scams that the government was talking about,” said Ms. Axel. “Bad actors abused Tornado cash to cover their tracks.”
Ms. Axel also shared how it was a conversation with Vitalik Barterin, the creator of Ethereum (the blockchain that Tornado Cash is deployed) that inspired him to create Tornado cash.
She told how Storm met Butterin at a conference and asked him what would be an important project to work on for Ethereum. According to Ms. Axel told butterin storm that transaction protection was a crucial problem to solve. Storm began to develop Tornado cash soon after.
Ms. Axel then went the jury through a series of illustrations explaining how Ethereum works and how Tornado Cash anonymizes transactions on the network.
(While the defense distilled this information well, I imagine it was still a little confusing to the members of the jury, of which no one reported to have any background in the study of technology.)
Ms. Axel highlighted the fact that Tornado Cash never charged fees for the service, though it could have.
She added how Even Butterin herself joined a “trustless ceremony” in May 2020, when the first Tornado Cash Test Pool was initiated.
She also said that when Tornado Cash Mixing Pools was launched, Storm and his co -founders burned the keys to them, which made the developers unable to have control over what happened within the pools.
“The government’s case is about how novel should have prevented hackers from using pools,” said Ms. Axel. “But he couldn’t do this.”
Ms. Axel completed his opening declaration by stating that Tornado Cash was nothing but a tool that both bad and good people used – much like WhatsApp, Signal, a VPN or even a hammer.
The first witness
After the end of the opening declares, the prosecution called his first witness, a Mrs. Lin, to the booth.
Mrs. Lin detailed a scenario where a scammer contacted her through WhatsApp and then Line, another messaging app that convinced her to open a crypto.com account and deposit a total of over $ 200,000 in it.
The scammer then went Mrs. Lin through the process of buying “crypto”, as Mrs. Lin put it before transferring this crypto to a shell company called NTU Capital, where Mrs. Lin was able to see her portfolio, as she said increased in value shortly after she deposited the funds.
The witness was dismissed before either she or the prosecution concluded the story, but in view of the purpose of the trial, one could assume that the funds were stolen from Mrs. Lin and then made the Tornado cash to be made unnoticable. (To clarify is the last half of the previous sentence speculation.)
Tomorrow’s schedule
The trial is set to resume tomorrow at. 9 est.
The prosecution informed the judge that it plans to bring at least three witnesses to the booth tomorrow.