The post Privacy Takes Center Stage in Closing Arguments at Tornado Cash Developer Roman Storm’s Trial appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

In brief Lawyers delivered closing arguments in Roman Storm’s criminal trial on Wednesday at a federal courthouse in New York. The jury began deliberations early Wednesday evening, but they quickly wrapped up discussions for the day. Storm faces a maximum sentence of more than 40 years in prison, if convicted on all three charges brought against him. Developer Roman Storm created coin mixer Tornado Cash not to champion Cypherpunk principles like privacy but to “make bags and bags of money,” U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday during a criminal trial in New York.  “The business was privacy for criminals,” federal prosecutor Benjamin Gianforti said in closing arguments, pointing to evidence that criminals had laundered stolen funds through the decentralized, non-custodial privacy protocol he had built back in 2019. Storm’s lawyers argued to the jury that their client never intended for hackers to use Tornado Cash, adding that the protocol was designed to enable ordinary people to send and receive funds privately. Mixers, such as Tornado Cash, enhance transaction privacy by obscuring the links between crypto senders and recipients, typically by pooling and redistributing funds with others.  “Nothing [Storm and his team] were doing was a panacea,” defense lawyer David Patton said, referring to Tornado Cash’s transaction-anonymizing features. “If you’re gonna have a privacy protocol, that’s part of it.”  Federal prosecutors dismissed the defense’s focus on privacy rights as a convenient “cover story,” however.  “The real money wasn’t in so-called ‘privacy’ for normal people,” Gianforti said. “It was in hiding dirty money for criminals.” The closing arguments capped a nearly three-week-long case that included expert and witness testimonies from blockchain technology experts, hackers, and victims of scams, as well as a litany of private messages between Storm and his Tornado Cash co-founders. The crypto community largely views the case as a referendum…

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Filed under: News - @ July 31, 2025 5:35 am