Dec 20, 2023

Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm pleaded not guilty back in September to charges of conspiring to operate a money transmitter or facilitate money laundering and sanctions evasion.

Video transcript

So Roman Storm is currently set to go on trial in September of 2024. Uh in the months leading up to that, we'll see, you know, arguments and amicus briefs from different parties about, you know, what kind of evidence they want to use, what kind of uh you know, arguments we they might use. So the, you know, as you say, one of the questions is, you know, was Storm arrested for developing the code. The DOJ alleges that, you know, Robert Storm, his co-founder, Robert Semenov and his other co-founder, Lexi Kurt, who is facing charges of his own in the Netherlands, uh whether they controlled the, you know, tomato cash, uh you know, the system, the protocol, the smart contracts uh where, you know, the allegations are basically like they control that they profited off a bit. And so they're being held liable for not having, you know, not implanting KYC or blocking malicious actors from using tomato cash. But yeah, the philosophical question is, are they really being arrested and, you know, charged for, you know, you know, not blocking people from using this uh protocol that they say that they gave up control over. Um and what does that mean for coders and developers and generally, you know, more broadly how people in crypto or other areas, uh how they are going to be held liable if you're gonna be held liable for things that may well be outside of their control. So give me a very interesting case to watch over next year.

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