Roman Storm, creator of the Tornado Cash privacy protocol, asked the open source software community if it was concerned about being retroactively prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for creating decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Storm he asked DeFi Developers: “How Can You Be Sure The Department of Justice Won’t Charge You as a Money Services Company for Building a Non-Governor Protocol?”
The Department of Justice could bring a case to court arguing that any decentralized non-custodial service should have been developed as a custodial service, as was done in the case against him, Storm added, citing his recent motion for acquittal, which was filed September 30.
“Our company has no ability to influence any changes or take any action with respect to the Tornado Cash protocol — it is a decentralized software protocol that no entity or entity can control,” Storm said in the acquittal. documents.
Storm was convicted in August on one of three charges; a jury found him guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transfer business, setting a risky legal precedent for open source software developers and sending shockwaves through the crypto community.
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The fight for privacy continues
After the verdict, legal experts debated whether U.S. prosecutors would pursue money laundering charges and impose sanctions against Storm in another trial.
The jury deadlocked during its deliberations and failed to reach a unanimous consensus on these issues, finding Storm guilty only of the unlicensed money transfer charge.
“If the Trump administration wants the United States to be the cryptocurrency capital of the world, then the Department of Justice cannot allow two blocked charges to be renewed,” Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer at venture capital firm Variant Fund, he wrote at this time on X.
Matthew Galeotti, acting deputy attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, signaled in August that the Justice Department would not retry Storm and would not prosecute similar cases.
“In our opinion, merely writing code without malicious intent is not a crime” – Galeotti he said audience at the American Innovation Project Summit, an event promoting regulatory support and pro-crypto legislation in the US.
“The Department will not use indictments as a law-making tool. The Department should not leave innovators in uncertainty, which may lead to the initiation of criminal proceedings,” he added.
Warehouse: Can privacy survive in US crypto policy after Roman Storm’s conviction?
