The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) case against Roman Storm, a developer behind the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, will move to trial, a New York judge ruled during a telephonic hearing on Thursday.
District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) denied Storm’s motion to dismiss the charges against him, opting to read a lengthy order to explain her decision.
Storm, along with fellow Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov, was indicted last August on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Prosecutors allege that Tornado Cash and its developers knowingly facilitated the laundering of over $1 billion, including hundreds of millions linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
Storm has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His lawyers argued in a motion to dismiss, filed in March, that Storm merely wrote the code for Tornado Cash, and any illicit use of the code was beyond his control. However, Judge Failla rejected this argument, allowing the case to proceed.
Additionally, the judge denied Storm’s motion to compel the DOJ to produce documents from Dutch authorities. The defense had requested access to materials related to Alexey Pertsev, another Tornado Cash developer recently convicted of money laundering in the Netherlands.
The judge ruled that Storm’s team had not demonstrated the relevance of the Dutch materials, calling the defense’s argument “speculative.”
Pertsev was sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court in May for facilitating $1.2 billion in money laundering through the crypto mixer between July 2019 and August 2022.
Storm’s trial is scheduled to begin on Dec. 2 in New York and is expected to last two weeks. If convicted on all counts, he faces up to 45 years in prison.
Tornado Cash is a decentralized protocol that provides privacy for transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to make anonymous transfers. While private financial transactions are legal, Tornado Cash has been exploited by some users for money laundering.
One of the judges characterized Tornado Cash as primarily a tool for criminal activity, which played a key role in Pertsev’s conviction.
