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Today, the day after the tornado cash trial, the prosecutor and defense provided an objection account in their opening remarks about why the defendant Rome storm began to tornado cash.
The statements were made after the jury selection process was completed.
The jury consisted of seven women and five men. The two members of the jury are in their 60s and 40s, of whom are in their 30s and 20s, five; eight have undergraduate degrees, three have high school degrees, and one has a master’s degree.
Jury members took the position after 2:00 PM ET, before the prosecution and the defense made their opening remarks.
Opening speech of prosecution
The prosecutor first delivered the opening ceremony.
Mr. Mosley faced the jury in the prosecution team and created the idea of tornado cash around the storm, whose main motivation was to enrich his own motivation, even if that meant “dirty money” by helping to launder money.
Mr Mosley said hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency had been funneled through tornado cash, a storm and its accomplices Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev could have made tornado cash less attractive to criminals, but chose not to.
He also cited how Tornado Cash violated sanctions because North Korean hackers used the service to launder money.
He suggested that the storm was inherently guilty because when news surfaced and North Korean hackers used to steal funds from hackers of the online crypto game Axie Infinitiy to steal money, he texted his co-founder with tornado cash, and we did it at the time. (In its opening speech, the defense admitted that the storm was done in “poor taste” wearing such a T-shirt.)
Mr Mosley also said the evidence would show that Storm and his accomplices in the tornado cash were deliberately running cryptocurrency “washing machines” to help launder money for bad actors and that once they learn that bad actors use it, it was designed for the tornado, even if they claimed they could not speak their statement, it was untrue Storm and his accomplices.
“He chose to launder money again and again,” said Storm’s Mosley.
Mr Mosley added that the storm tried to “cover its own behavior” by using an account that was not its own “cash” with millions of dollars. (No details are provided about this being a bank or crypto exchange account.)
Finally, Mr Mosley said the evidence in the case would include encrypted chats about the tornado cash business. The defendant communicated with victims of cryptocurrency hackers, which flowed through the tornado cash; and showed the documents cashed by the storm in August 2022 using someone else’s account.
The opening speech of defense
Ms. Axel, a member of the defense team, addressed the jury after Mr. Mosley.
She first portrayed the storm’s photos as a hardworking immigrant, a preference for computer programming, adding that he worked for many well-known tech companies, including Amazon.
She said the storm created tornado cash to help resolve financial privacy issues when dealing with public blockchain transactions, and claimed he had no connection with any bad actors using the service.
“Roman has nothing to do with the hacking and scams the government is talking about,” Ms. Axel said. “Bad actors abused tornado cash to cover up their tracks.”
Ms. Axel also shared a conversation with Ethereum’s creator (the blockchain that deploys tornado cash) with Vitalik Buterin, which inspired him to create tornado cash.
She tells how Storm met Buterin at a meeting and asked him what the important project he was working for Ethereum. According to Ms. Axel, Butling told Storm that transaction privacy is a crucial issue to be addressed. The development of tornado cash began shortly after the storm.
Ms. Axel then browsed a series of illustrations that explain how Ethereum works and how tornado cash is traded anonymously on the web.
(Although the defense has refined the information well, I can imagine that it still makes jury members a little confused and no one reports any research technical background.)
Ms. Axel highlighted the fact that Tornado Cash never charges the service, although it may be charged.
She added that even Butling herself joined the “trustless ceremony” in May 2020, where the first tornado cash test pool began.
She also said that once the tornado cash mix pool was launched, Storm and his co-founders burned their keys, leaving developers unable to control what was happening in the pool.
“The government’s case is about how Roman should stop hackers from using the pool,” Ms. Axel said. “But he can’t.”
Ms. Axel summed up her opening remarks, pointing out that Tornado Cash is nothing more than a tool that everyone has both bad ones – like whatsapp, signal, VPN and even hammers.
The first witness
After the opening ceremony, the prosecutor summoned his first witness, Ms. Lin, to his position.
Ms. Lin detailed a scenario where the scammer contacted her through WhatsApp, followed by another messaging app Line, convinced her to open a Crypto.com account and deposited a total of more than $200,000 into it.
The scammer then walked Ms. Lin along the process of buying “cryptocurrency” and then transferred the cryptocurrency to a Shell company called NTU Capital, where Ms. Lin was able to view her portfolio, and she said she would add value soon after she deposited the funds.
Witnesses were dismissed before she or the prosecution ended, but given the purpose of the trial, one might think that the funds were stolen from Ms. Lin and then poured tornado cash into making it untraceable. (Clarify, the second half of the previous sentence is a guess.)
Tomorrow’s timetable
The trial is scheduled to resume tomorrow at 9 a.m. ET.
Prosecutors told the judge that it plans to bring at least three witnesses to the stance tomorrow.