\n<\/p>\n
Today, during the second day of the Tornado Cash trial<\/a>, the prosecution and defense provided opposing accounts in their opening statements for why the defendant in the case, Roman Storm, started Tornado Cash.<\/p>\n SUMMARY OF DAY 2 OF TORNADO CASH TRIAL<\/p>\n The prosecution and defense deliver opening statements, and the first witness takes the stand\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/ZIKt3SE2ZP<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Frank Corva (@frankcorva) July 15, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n These statements were delivered after the jury selection process concluded.<\/p>\n The jury consists of seven women and five men; two members of the jury are in their 60s, four in their 40s, one in their 30s, and five in their 20s; and eight have undergraduate degrees, three have high school degrees and one has a master\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n The members of the jury took the stand just after 2:00 p.m. EST, right before both the prosecution and defense delivered their opening statements.<\/p>\n The prosecution delivered its opening statement first.<\/p>\n From the prosecution\u2019s team, Mr. Mosley faced the jury and harped on the notion that Storm created Tornado Cash with the primary motivation of enriching himself \u2014 even if that meant doing so by helping to launder \u201cdirty money.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Mosley stated that hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of crypto had been funneled through Tornado Cash, and that Storm and his co-conspirators, Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev<\/a>, could have made Tornado Cash less attractive to criminals but chose not to.<\/p>\n He also cited how Tornado Cash facilitated sanctions violations, as North Korean hackers had used the service to launder crypto funds.<\/p>\n He implied that Storm was inherently guilty because he\u2019d texted his co-founders in Tornado Cash \u201cGuys, we\u2019re done for\u201d when the news surfaced that North Korean hackers used Tornado Cash to mix the funds stolen from the hack of online crypto game Axie Infinitiy<\/a> as well as when Storm wore a T-shirt with a washing machine and a Tornado Cash logo on it to a crypto conference. (The defense, in its opening statement, admitted that Storm\u2019s wearing such a T-shirt was done in \u201cpoor taste.\u201d)<\/p>\n Mr. Mosley also stated that the evidence will show that Storm and his co-conspirators in Tornado Cash were intentionally running a crypto \u201cwashing machine\u201d to help launder funds for bad actors and that it\u2019s untrue the Storm and his co-conspirators were unable to make changes to the design of Tornado Cash once they learned that bad actors were using it, even though they claimed that they couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cHe chose to launder money time after time,\u201d said Mr. Mosley of Storm.<\/p>\n Mr. Mosley added that Storm attempted to \u201chide his actions\u201d by \u201ccashing out\u201d to the tune of millions of dollars using an account that wasn\u2019t his own. (No details on whether this was a banking or crypto exchange account were provided.)<\/p>\n Finally, Mr. Mosley stated that the evidence in the case will include encrypted chats about the Tornado Cash business; the defendants\u2019 communications with victims of crypto hacks, the funds for which flowed through Tornado Cash; and documents that show that Storm used someone else\u2019s account in August 2022 to cash out.<\/p>\n Ms. Axel, a member of the defense\u2019s team, addressed the jury after Mr. Mosley.<\/p>\n She began by painting a picture of Storm as a hardworking immigrant with a penchant for computer programming, adding that he\u2019s worked for a number of reputable tech companies, including Amazon.<\/p>\n She stated that Storm created Tornado Cash to help solve the problem of financial privacy when transacting on a public blockchain, and claimed that he had no association with any of the bad actors who used the service.<\/p>\n \u201cRoman had nothing to do with the hacks and scams that the government was talking about,\u201d said Ms. Axel. \u201cBad actors misused Tornado Cash to cover their tracks.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Axel also shared how it was a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum (the blockchain on which Tornado Cash is deployed), that inspired him to create Tornado Cash.<\/p>\n She recounted how Storm met Buterin at a conference and asked him what would be an important project to work on for Ethereum. According to Ms. Axel, Buterin told Storm that transactional privacy was an crucial problem to solve. Storm started developing Tornado Cash soon after.<\/p>\n Ms. Axel then walked the jury through a series of illustrations that explained how Ethereum works and how Tornado Cash anonymizes transactions on the network.<\/p>\n (While the defense distilled this information well, I can imagine it was still a bit confusing to the members of the jury, none of whom reported having any background in studying technology.)<\/p>\n Ms. Axel highlighted the fact that Tornado Cash never charged fees for the service, though it could have.<\/p>\n She added how even Buterin himself joined a \u201ctrustless ceremony\u201d in May 2020 in which the first Tornado Cash test pool was initiated.<\/p>\n She also stated that once the Tornado Cash mixing pools were launched, Storm and his co-founders burned the keys to them, rendering the developers unable to have any control over what happened within the pools.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government\u2019s case is about how Roman should have stopped hackers from using pools,\u201d said Ms. Axel. \u201cBut he couldn\u2019t do this.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Axel concluded her opening statement by stating that Tornado Cash was nothing more than a tool that both bad and good people used \u2014 much like WhatsApp, Signal, a VPN or even a hammer.<\/p>\n Upon the conclusion of the opening statements, the prosecution called its first witness, a Ms. Lin, to the stand.<\/p>\n Ms. Lin detailed a scenario in which a scammer contacted her through WhatsApp and then LINE, another messaging app, convincing her to open a Crypto.com<\/a> account and deposit a total of over $200,000 into it.<\/p>\n The scammer then walked Ms. Lin through the process of buying \u201ccrypto,\u201d as Ms. Lin put it, before transferring that crypto to a shell company called NTU Capital, where Ms. Lin was able to view her portfolio, which she said increased in value soon after she deposited the funds.<\/p>\n The witness was dismissed before either she or the prosecution concluded the story, but given the purpose of the trial, one might assume that the funds were stolen from Ms. Lin and then put through Tornado Cash to be made untraceable. (To clarify, the latter half of the previous sentence is speculation.)<\/p>\n The trial is set to resume tomorrow at 9 a.m. EST.<\/p>\n The prosecution informed the judge that it plans to bring at least three more witnesses to the stand tomorrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
The Opening Statement from the Prosecution<\/h2>\n
The Opening Statement from the Defense<\/h2>\n
The First Witness<\/h2>\n
Tomorrow\u2019s Schedule<\/h2>\n