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Roman Storm, a creator of the Tornado Cash privacy-focused protocol, inquired of the open source software community if they fear being retroactively prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) systems.
Storm queried DeFi developers: “What makes you confident that you won’t face charges from the DOJ as a money service business for creating a non-custodial protocol?”
The DOJ might initiate a case, asserting that any decentralized, non-custodial service ought to have been established as a custodial service, as it did in the case against him. Storm mentioned this in relation to his recent petition for acquittal, which was submitted on September 30.
“Our organization lacks any capacity to effect any change or undertake any action regarding the Tornado Cash protocol — it is a decentralized software protocol that no single entity or actor can control,” Storm is reported as stating in the acquittal documents.
Storm was found guilty in August on one of three charges; the jury determined he was guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business, creating a perilous legal precedent for open source software creators and resonating through the crypto community.
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The battle for privacy persists
After the ruling, legal analysts deliberated on whether US prosecutors would continue the money laundering and sanctions accusations against Storm in a subsequent trial.
The jury was stalemated during discussions and could not reach a unanimous agreement on those charges, finding Storm guilty solely on the unlicensed money transmitter accusation.
“If the Trump administration aims for the USA to become the crypto capital of the world, then the DOJ must not be permitted to retry the two deadlocked counts,” Jake Chervinsky, Chief Legal Officer at the venture capital firm Variant Fund, stated on X at that moment.
Matthew Galeotti, the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Criminal Division, indicated in August that the DOJ would not initiate a retrial for Storm and would refrain from prosecuting similar cases.
“Our perspective is that simply writing code, without malevolent intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti remarked to the audience at the American Innovation Project Summit, an event advocating for regulatory reform and pro-crypto legislation in the US.
“The department will not employ indictments as a means of law-making. The department should avoid leaving innovators in uncertainty regarding what might trigger criminal prosecution,” he continued.
Magazine: Can privacy endure in US crypto policy following Roman Storm’s conviction?
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