Tornado Cash trial nears an end
The post Tornado Cash trial nears an end appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Homepage > News > Business > Tornado Cash trial nears an end The federal trial of Tornado Cash Co-founder Roman Storm is entering the end game, with closing arguments commencing and a verdict expected early August. Storm is accused of money laundering and sanctions violations. If found guilty, it could set a significant precedent for how United States courts treat creators of decentralized privacy-preserving technologies. In August 2023, federal criminal charges were filed against the 34-year-old Russian expat and fellow Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which accused the pair of laundering more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds, as well as facilitating sanctions violations. While Storm was taken into custody in the U.S., Semenov is still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and believed to be in Russia, beyond the DOJ’s reach—resulting in Storm facing trial alone. Background Tornado Cash is a digital asset ‘mixer’ platform, co-founded in 2019 by Storm, Semenov, and Alexey Pertsev, a Russian national and resident in the Netherlands. A digital asset mixer, or a tumbler, is a platform that mixes potentially identifiable digital asset funds with others, usually by pooling them, to obfuscate the fund’s original source. Naturally, such platforms have become favored tools of terrorists, criminals, and money launderers, and as such, often find themselves on sanction lists, particularly in the U.S., prominent examples being Sinbad.io and ChipMixer. On August 8, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury bestowed this unenviable honor on Tornado Cash, sanctioning the platform along with any Ethereum address that interacts with it, making it illegal for U.S. citizens, residents, and companies to receive or send money through the mixer service. The Treasury Department accused Tornado Cash of having aided criminal actors, including laundering more than $7…
The post Tornado Cash trial nears an end appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Homepage > News > Business > Tornado Cash trial nears an end The federal trial of Tornado Cash Co-founder Roman Storm is entering the end game, with closing arguments commencing and a verdict expected early August. Storm is accused of money laundering and sanctions violations. If found guilty, it could set a significant precedent for how United States courts treat creators of decentralized privacy-preserving technologies. In August 2023, federal criminal charges were filed against the 34-year-old Russian expat and fellow Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which accused the pair of laundering more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds, as well as facilitating sanctions violations. While Storm was taken into custody in the U.S., Semenov is still wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and believed to be in Russia, beyond the DOJ’s reach—resulting in Storm facing trial alone. Background Tornado Cash is a digital asset ‘mixer’ platform, co-founded in 2019 by Storm, Semenov, and Alexey Pertsev, a Russian national and resident in the Netherlands. A digital asset mixer, or a tumbler, is a platform that mixes potentially identifiable digital asset funds with others, usually by pooling them, to obfuscate the fund’s original source. Naturally, such platforms have become favored tools of terrorists, criminals, and money launderers, and as such, often find themselves on sanction lists, particularly in the U.S., prominent examples being Sinbad.io and ChipMixer. On August 8, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury bestowed this unenviable honor on Tornado Cash, sanctioning the platform along with any Ethereum address that interacts with it, making it illegal for U.S. citizens, residents, and companies to receive or send money through the mixer service. The Treasury Department accused Tornado Cash of having aided criminal actors, including laundering more than $7…
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