Three cryptocurrency advocacy groups have filed comments in the case of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm.
Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, who was arrested last August and charged with three counts related to his role as co-founder of Ethereum privacy protocol Tornado Cash, has received support in the form of three opinion letters from prominent cryptocurrency advocacy groups.
Storm agreed last week to drop the charges against him, calling the government’s claims “fatally flawed” in its characterization of various elements of Tornado Cash’s services and blockchain technology. Russian national and Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov, who was also indicted on charges, is still awaiting trial, while another co-founder, Alexey Pertsev, is currently awaiting the outcome of his trial in the Netherlands in May. A ruling is expected. 14.
The three amicus briefs were filed by Coin Center, Blockchain Association, and DeFi Education Fund. Although separately prepared and filed briefs make broadly similar claims about the nature of the case for which the government was charged.
For example, the government’s indictment alleges that Semenov and Storm “engaged in the business of transferring funds on behalf of the public,” but Tornado Cash was not registered with the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), leading to conspiracy charges. The act of operating an unlicensed money transfer business.
However, the Blockchain Association briefly points out that this characterization runs counter to FinCEN’s own definition. “The remittancer’s liability cannot be imposed unless the intermediary exercises completely independent control over the assets,” it states. “Indeed, FinCEN’s own guidance acknowledges that ‘…anonymization software vendors’ are not conduits of funds.”
The brief details how Tornado Cash works without giving developers independent control over user assets, and states that if the government’s position that Tornado Cash is a money transfer business is maintained, “… the Bank Secrecy Act will make it impossible for developers to do so.” “This means that the government’s interpretation is equivalent to banning anonymization protocols.”
Coyne Center’s brief focuses on allegations of conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) and provides a First Amendment defense to those charges. The conspiracy count related to Tornado Cache’s alleged sanctions violations should not be maintained as “public decisions about what the software would do and how it would be released (made long before there was any knowledge of North Korea’s state-sponsored hackers).” ) the activities of the Lazarus Group could have existed,” he briefly asserts.
Claiming that Tornado’s founders colluded with Lazarus is tantamount to suggesting that “developers of the Linux open source operating system, allied with the Iranian regime, are freely releasing valuable computing tools that Iran will later use to power its weapons-related computers.” . program,” he explains briefly.
An overview from the DeFi Education Fund opposing the allegations offers a bleak outlook for how the legal profession could change if Storm loses. “This theory of liability, if proven in court, would give the government unlimited power to prosecute software developers who wrote code that was later used by third parties for nefarious purposes, simply because the developers later became aware of this use. .” Read briefly. “Without the doctrine of limitations, almost every developer who creates open source software would, years or even decades later, be criminally liable for activities beyond their control.”
Government prosecutors have not yet responded to Storm’s request to dismiss the charges.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet delivering news, research and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor in The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the cryptocurrency space. Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget is an anchor LP of Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to provide objective, impactful and timely information about the cryptocurrency industry. Below are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not provided or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.
