Roman Storm, a developer of the Tornado Cash privacy protocol, asked the open source software community in the event that they feared being retroactively prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Storm asked DeFi developers: “How are you able to be so sure that the DOJ is not going to charge you as a money services company for making a non-custodial protocol?”
The DOJ could prosecute a case arguing that any non-custodial decentralized service must have been developed as a custodial service, as was the case against him, Storm added, pointing to his recent motion for acquittal filed on Sept. 30.
Source: Roman Storm
“Our company has no ability to make changes or take any motion with respect to the Tornado Cash protocol – it’s a decentralized software protocol that no single entity or actor can control,” Storm is quoted as saying within the acquittal documents.
Storm was convicted in August on considered one of three counts; The jury found him guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transfer company, setting a dangerous precedent for open source software developers and sending shockwaves through the crypto community.
The battle for privacy continues
After the decision, legal experts discussed whether US prosecutors would pursue the cash laundering and sanctions allegations against Storm in further proceedings.
The jury was deadlocked during deliberations and was unable to succeed in a unanimous consensus on these points. She found Storm guilty only of the unlicensed money transmission charge.
“If the Trump administration wants the US to turn out to be the crypto capital of the world, then the DOJ must not be allowed to retry the 2 stalled cases,” Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer at enterprise capital firm Variant Fund, wrote on X on the time.
Matthew Galeotti, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Criminal Division, announced in August that the DOJ wouldn’t reopen the case against Storm or prosecute similar cases.
“In our view, simply writing code without malicious intent just isn’t a criminal offense,” Galeotti told the audience on the American Innovation Project Summit, a regulatory advocacy and pro-crypto laws event within the US.
“The ministry is not going to use indictments as a legislative tool. The ministry mustn’t leave innovators in the dead of night, which could lead on to criminal prosecution,” he added.
