At the eve of the highly anticipated trial of Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, the defense makes a strong impact: a key piece of evidence presented by the prosecution would simply be… false.
The Department of Justice (DOJ), through the Southern District of New York prosecutor’s office, had used a shocking phrase from a Telegram exchange to illustrate the ‘guilty conscience’ of the Tornado developers. The message, mentioning the laundering of $600 million from the Ronin bridge hack (Axie Infinity), was believed to have been written by Alexey Pertsev, another project developer. The issue? It was actually an excerpt written by a CoinDesk journalist, simply forwarded by Pertsev in a Telegram channel.
An embarrassing error for the DOJ
This detail is far from trivial. The message had been quoted by Assistant Prosecutor Ben Arad during a hearing on July 8, with unequivocal statements:
One of the co-conspirators asked how to launder $600 million of stolen crypto.
A weighty formulation, intended to demonstrate that the Tornado Cash team was acting knowingly outside the rules, well before the OFAC sanctions.
However, according to documents filed in the case, the original message came from journalist Andrew Thurman. It had been shared in a Telegram group as information, not as a money laundering advice request. Storm’s defense claims that the DOJ was unaware of the real origin of the message until recently, and only discovered the error after the defense raised it.
Tornado Cash vs DOJ: a tense procedural battle
The prosecution admits to having provided the defense with an incomplete initial version of the Telegram messages in September 2023, a version that did not mention that the message had been ‘forwarded’. However, they claim to have corrected this in December 2024, by providing a revised version with the ‘forwarded’ tag.
For Storm’s team, this belated correction is not sufficient. They now demand complete exclusion of the Telegram messages from Pertsev’s phone, and ask the judge for access to the grand jury transcripts. The reason cited is that the prosecution had presented misleading evidence to the jury.
The government has never disclosed when it discovered the error. Therefore, it is not in a position to blame the defense for not reporting it earlier.
Major legal implications for the crypto sector
This trial promises to set a defining precedent for developers of crypto privacy tools. Tornado Cash, sanctioned by U.S. authorities since 2022, is accused of facilitating the laundering of billions of dollars, including funds linked to North Korean groups.
But the Roman Storm case could tip on procedural details. A simple error of attribution could call into question a series of evidence, weakening the DOJ’s case. At a time when open-source developers scrutinize every legal development, this trial goes beyond the fate of just one man.
