Tornado Cash Creator Seeks a Way Out of Legal Battle
Tornado Cash Creator Seeks a Way Out of Legal Battle
Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm, 34, seeks a way out of money laundering charges filed by the US Department of Treasury against their crypto mixing service in 2022.
In a motion filed over the weekend, Storm’s legal team pointed out Tornado Cash became immutable and publicly available before it was used by hacking groups. Another of their legal arguments pointed out that the enterprise could not be characterized as a money transmitting business because users are ‘not directly charged fees’ when using Tornado Cash.
According to the records from the US Department of Justice website, the crypto mixer allegedly facilitated over $1 billion in money laundering transactions, notoriously dominated by North Korea’s cybercrime unit Lazarus.
Tornado Cash is an Ethereum-built privacy solution that allows users to make private transactions through breaking and concealing the on-chain link between the transacting parties. This makes it hard to track activity on the blockchain for outside observers, contrary to the immutable by traceable nature of blockchain-based transactions.
Since it has become a public technology first, Storm’s lawyers argued that there was little that he could have done to prevent hacking groups from using their platform, a report from CoinTelegraph detailed.
In September 2023, the co-founder pleaded not guilty over all the charges filed against him. Storm is one of the three founders of Tornado Cash, alongside Roman Semenov, another indicated person of interest in the case. Both are charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of conspiracy in violation of the Economic Emergency Powers Act, the DOJ website revealed.
Tornado Cash currently holds a market capitalization of $10.31 million. Its native token with a ticker symbol ‘TORN’ is trading at $2.71 apiece.
