Roman Storm, developer of privacy protocol Tornado Cash, asked the open source software community if they were concerned about being retroactively sued by the US Department of Justice for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Storm asked DeFi developers: “How can you be sure that the DOJ will not charge you as a money services company for creating a non-custodial protocol?
The DOJ could file suit, arguing that any decentralized, non-custodial service should have been developed as a custodial service, as it did in the case against it, Storm added, citing its recent motion for acquittal, filed on September 30.
“Our company has no ability to make changes or take any action regarding the Tornado Cash Protocol – it is a decentralized software protocol that no single entity or actor can control,” Storm said in the acquittal documents.
Storm was convicted in August on one of three counts: The jury found him guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, setting a dangerous 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 and sanctions charges against Storm in another trial.
The jury was deadlocked during deliberations and did not reach a unanimous consensus on these counts, finding Storm guilty only on the charge of transferring money without a license.
“If the Trump administration wants the United States to be the crypto capital of the world, then the DOJ must not be allowed to retry the two deadlocked charges,” Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer at venture capital firm Variant Fund, wrote on X at the time.
Matthew Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s criminal division, signaled in August that the DOJ would not open a new trial against Storm or pursue similar cases.
“Our view is that simply writing code, without malicious intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti told the audience at the American Innovation Project Summit, an advocacy event for pro-crypto regulation and legislation in the United States.
“The department will not use indictments as a legislative tool. The department should not leave innovators guessing about what could lead to criminal prosecution,” he added.
Review: Can privacy survive in US crypto policy after Roman Storm’s conviction?
