Tornado Cash Co-Founder Roman Storm Denies Wrongdoing Ahead of Criminal Trial

"I'm Being Punished Before Being Proven Guilty," Storm Says

Hold onto your hats, crypto fans! With his criminal trial just weeks away, Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm is breaking his silence and fiercely denying any wrongdoing. This guy's not backing down!

In a no-holds-barred interview with Crypto in America, Storm dropped the bombshell that the U.S. government is gunning for him just because he wrote some open-source code. He's adamant that he hasn't committed any actual crimes.

Storm's facing three heavy-duty felony charges, including conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate sanctions law. Federal prosecutors are throwing the book at him, claiming that Tornado Cash, which he founded with two others, was used to launder a staggering $1 billion in dirty money, some of it linked to North Korea's notorious Lazarus hacker group. But Storm's not having it.

He's standing firm, denying any knowledge of facilitating criminal activity. According to Storm, Tornado Cash was all about protecting user privacy, and once it was out there, it ran on its own, completely out of his control.

"I did not have any contact whatsoever with any criminals, any criminal organizations, any illicit actors, or any North Koreans," he fired back, adding, "We didn't have control over what happened. If someone did something illicit, we couldn't stop it."

"When Tornado Cash became fully decentralized and trustless, there wasn't much going on at first. We thought it would just be another project collecting dust in our junkyard. As software engineers, we've got tons of those. We never saw this coming."

Storm was arrested back in August 2023, and his fellow developer, Alexey Pertsev, got hit with a 64-month prison sentence for money laundering last year in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Tornado Cash's third co-founder, Roman Semenov, is also in the hot seat but still on the run.

Since his arrest, Storm says he's been living under strict bail conditions, cut off from the financial system with no bank accounts and no access to crypto wallets. "I'm being punished before being proven guilty," he declared.

When pressed about the bigger picture, Storm warned that a conviction could be a death knell for developers and open-source innovation in the U.S. crypto scene.

"If I lose my case, DeFi dies with me," he said, arguing that treating developers like criminals is a slippery slope that could have disastrous consequences.

Storm's trial is set to kick off on July 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. While he's keeping his cards close to the vest on his defense strategy, like whether he'll take the stand, he made it clear that his team will fight tooth and nail, arguing that writing code is free speech and that creating open-source tools isn't a crime, even if some bad apples misuse them.

Meanwhile, support for Storm is growing like wildfire. Heavy hitters in the industry, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, have stepped up to back his defense and throw cash into his legal fund.