A Chainalysis percipient witness pleads the Fifth as defense debunks Government tracing testimonies

We’re now in the third and likely final week of U.S. v. Storm, the criminal trial of Roman Storm on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, sanctions violations, and some ambiguous third thing. Storm, who created the Tornado Cash Ethereum ‘mixing’ software with partners Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev, faces a maximum sentence of as much as 40 years in prison.

The trial has potentially dramatic implications for legal precedent, because Storm and his team, who incorporated in the U.S. as Peppersec, are not believed or argued to have communicated or coordinated in any way with the actual money launderers, including North Korea’s Lazarus hackers, who played a starring role in the initial indictment. Nobody argues that Storm and co. made plans with Lazarus or any of the hackers or scammers who allegedly used their Tornado Cash software to obscure their financial activity.

Instead, the prosecution rests on the idea that they constructed Tornado Cash for purely criminal purposes from the start, with purely mercenary motives. So maybe the overriding material question determining Roman Storm’s future is whether he and his friends set out with the goal of getting rich from enabling a decentralized criminal money laundry, or were motivated by the practical need for privacy on Ethereum. So far in the case, there have been a few suggestive hints towards the first one, including a jokey washing-machine t-shirt; and more substantive support for nobler motives, including the invocation of Vitalik Buterin’s advice to work on privacy, and admiration expressed for Tornado Cash as technology by at least one prosecution witness.

...read more at therage.co