Today, during the second day of the cash trial of the Tornado, the accusation and the defense provided accounts of opponents in their opening declarations on why the defendant in the event, Roman Storm, started at Tornado Cash.
These declarations were delivered after the conclusion of the jury selection process.
The jury consists of seven women and five men; Two members of the jury are about 60 years old, four on the 40 years, one over 30 and five on the twenty years; And eight have degrees in degree, three have a high school diploma and one has a master’s degree.
The members of the jury took a position immediately after 14:00 east, just before it is the accusation that the defense delivered their opening declarations.
The declaration of opening of the accusation
The accusation first released his declaration of opening.
From the accusation team, Mosley faced the jury and had the idea that Storm created Tornado money with the primary motivation to get rich, even if this meant doing it by helping to recycle “dirty money”.
Mosley said that hundreds of millions of cryptocurrency dollars had been channeled through the cash and that the storm and his conspirators, Roman Senov and Alexey Pertsev, could have made the money of the tornado less attractive for criminals but chose not to do it.
He also mentioned how Tornado Cash facilitated the violations of the sanctions, since the North Korean hackers had used the service to recycle cryptographic funds.
He implied that the storm was intrinsically guilty because he had sent a message to his co-founders in Tornado Cash “Guys, we finished” when the news emerged that the North Korean hackers used Tornado Cash to mix the funds stolen from the hack of a Crypto Game Infinitiy, as well as when Storm wore a shirt with a blackboard and a lever in Tornado for a conference for a conference of Tornado for a conference of Tornado Crypto. (The defense, in his declaration of opening, admitted that the storm wore such a shirt was made in “bad taste”.)
Mosley has also declared that the rehearsals will show that Storm and his conspirators in cash in Tornado intentionally managed a “washing machine” crypto to help recycle funds for bad actors and that the storm and his co -ospacers are not able to make changes to the design of the tornado cash once the bad guys were using, even if they supported that they could not.
“He chose to recycle money after now,” said Mosley Di Storm.
Mr. Mosley added that Storm attempted to “hide his actions” “grossed” the sum of millions of dollars using an account that was not his. (No details have been provided on the fact that it was a bank or cryptocurrency exchange account.)
Finally, Mosley said that the rehearsals in case will include encryption chats on the cash activity of the Tornado; the communications of the defendants with the victims of hacks of cryptocurrencies, the funds for which they flowed through the cash of the Tornado; And documents showing that Storm used someone else’s account in August 2022 to collect.
The declaration of opening of the defense
Mrs. Axel, a member of the defense team, turned to the jury after Mr. Mosley.
He started painting a Storm image as a laborious immigrant with a propensity for computer programming, adding that he worked for a series of reliable technological companies, including Amazon.
He said Storm created Tornado Cash to help solve the financial privacy problem when it was a public blockchain and said he had no association with any of the bad actors who used the service.
“Roman had nothing to do with the hacks and scams that the government spoke of,” said Mrs. Axel. “The bad actors improperly used Tornado’s money to cover their tracks.”
Mrs. Axel also shared the way it was a conversation with Vitalik Boterin, the creator of Ethereum (the blockchain on which the Tornado cash is deployed), who inspired him to create tornado cash.
He told how Storm met Botterin at a conference and asked him what would be an important project to work on for Ethereum. According to Mrs. Axel, Bterin told Storm that transactional privacy was a crucial problem to be solved. Storm began to develop tornado cash immediately after.
Mrs. Axel then accompanied the jury through a series of illustrations that explained how Ethereum works and like the Tornado Cash Anonys anonymous on the net.
(While the defense has distilled this information well, I can imagine that it was still a little confused for the members of the jury, none of whom reported that he has any background in the study of technology.)
Mrs. Axel stressed the fact that Tornado Cash has never charged the commissions for the service, even if it could have.
He added how Botterin himself also joined a “ceremony without confidence” in May 2020 in which the first power pool of cash tests of Tornado was started.
He also said that once the cash mixing pools of Tornado, Storm and his co-founders burned the keys, making the developers unable to have any control over what happened inside the pools.
“The case of the government concerns the way in which Roman should have prevented hackers from using swimming pools,” said Mrs. Axel. “But he couldn’t do it.”
Mrs. Axel concluded her declaration of opening by stating that Tornado Cash was nothing more than a tool that used both bad people and good ones – just like WhatsApp, Signal, a VPN or even a hammer.
The first witness
At the conclusion of the opening declarations, the accusation called his first witness, a lady Lin, at the stand.
Mrs. Lin detailed a scenario in which a scammer contacted it via WhatsApp and then line, another messaging app, convincing her to open a Crypto.com account and deposit a total of over $ 200,000.
The scammer then walked on Mrs. Lin through the “crypto” purchase process, as Mrs. Lin said, before transferring that cryptocurrency to a shell company called Ntu Capital, in which Mrs. Lin was able to see her wallet, which in your opinion increased in value immediately after depositing the funds.
The witness was fired before you or the accusation concluded the story, but given the purpose of the trial, it could be assumed that the funds had been stolen by Mrs. Lin and then put in cash for the Tornado to be rendered not traceable. (To clarify, the second half of the previous sentence is speculation.)
Tomorrow’s program
The test is destined to resume tomorrow at 9 in the morning.
The accusation informed the judge who plans to bring at least three other witnesses to the stand.