Hacker, IRS agent take Storm trial stand as government winds down case

The US government expects to rest its case against Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm on Thursday following yesterday’s anticipated testimony from an expert witness.

The defense is set to counter the prosecution’s efforts to show Storm could have better guarded against “bad actors” using Tornado Cash — the crypto mixer used for transaction privacy around which this case centers.

IRS Criminal Investigation special agent Stephan George took the stand to share findings that appeared to link a portion of the funds stolen from Hanfeng Lin to Tornado Cash.

Lin testified last week that a fraud recovery service told her to contact Tornado Cash about retrieving her funds. The defense was reportedly considering a mistrial motion after a subsequent witness, FBI Special Agent Joel DeCapua, didn’t link Lin’s funds to Tornado Cash — putting the relevance of Lin’s testimony in question.

But George said Wednesday he used public blockchain data — along with Chainalysis Reactor and TRM Labs — to find that a portion of Lin’s stolen funds that left Crypto.com ultimately went to Tornado Cash in November of 2021.

He used an accounting method known as Last In, First Out (LIFO) — which assumes the disposal of crypto acquired most recently. When defense attorney Keri Axel challenged LIFO during cross-examination, George defended the method as a generally accepted accounting principle that the IRS “respects.”

Axel’s cross-examination of George was set to continue Thursday morning.

While the possibility of a mistrial was briefly mentioned in court Tuesday, the defense did not immediately comment about whether that’s still being considered.

“It’s usually not the situation that a trial is declared a mistrial merely because a witness’s testimony is not entirely germane,” Patrick Gruhn, a former partner at Crypto Lawyers LLC and FTX’s ex-head of Europe, told Blockworks. “Courts generally expect a lot more — egregious misconduct or prejudicial facts against the jury — before they suspend a trial.”

Though George linking Lin’s funds to Tornado Cash was an attempt by prosecutors to clear up a point of contention that arose, the charges against Storm go well beyond that.

At the heart of this case is whether Storm essentially helped criminals — such as North Korean state-sponsored hackers, The Lazarus Group — hide stolen funds, as the government alleges. He is charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Key questions of the case, as shared in opening statements last week, include whether Tornado Cash was immutable and if the developer is responsible for how software is used.

Defense attorney Keri Axel said in her opening statement: “It’s not a crime to make a useful thing that is misused.”

After the jury left the courtroom on Wednesday afternoon, the prosecution told Judge Katherine Polk Failla that it had two witnesses remaining and could wrap up by Thursday morning.

Though the defense had not finalized its slate of witnesses before the court let out on Wednesday, Storm’s attorneys said they could rest their case as soon as Monday. Storm has not yet decided whether he will take the stand, they added.

“I assume you don’t have a hacker testifying,” Failla quipped. “That would be interesting.”

Hacker takes the stand

The prosecution did put a hacker on the stand on Tuesday. That was Shakeeb Ahmed, who is currently serving a three-year sentence after pleading guilty to computer fraud last year.

Ahmed, a former technical lead in Amazon’s bug-bounty program, detailed how he stole $12 million worth of crypto from exchanges Crema and Nirvana in 2022.

He put his own funds into a Tornado Cash pool to “anonymize” them before using a third party — known as a relayer — to withdraw them. He then went on to hack the Crema exchange. He did not use Tornado Cash at any point leading up to, or after, he hacked the Nirvana exchange.

The defense, during cross-examination, made clear to the jury that Ahmed never put stolen funds into Tornado Cash.

“You didn’t use Tornado Cash for the [hack] proceeds?” defense attorney David Patton asked.

“Correct,” Ahmed said.

Patton also asked whether Ahmed ever communicated with Storm and the other Tornado Cash founders, or conspired with them to commit crimes.

“I did not,” Ahmed noted.

Questioning Tornado Cash’s design choice

The prosecution sought to establish, through another witness, that Storm — along with Tornado Cash co-founders Roman Semenov and Alexey Pertsev — could have made changes to the protocol to guard against bad actors using it.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) deemed the Lazarus Group responsible for the $625 million Ronin Bridge hack in March 2022 and sanctioned the entity. Tornado Cash said the following month that it was using a Chainalysis oracle contract “to block OFAC-sanctioned addresses from accessing the dapp.”

Philip Werlau, an investigator at AnChain.AI, testified that — while that blocked sanctioned entities from using Tornado Cash’s web application — founders did not implement this control for deposits made via its Command Line Interface (CLI).

“If there are two doors to a building and you only close one, you’re not preventing access,” Werlau said.

Werlau also explained how Tornado Cash could have maintained an offchain registry with users’ personal info collected through a username-password system.

Anticipating this testimony, defense attorneys noted to the judge earlier that day that while Tornado Cash could have been designed differently, that doesn’t mean what Storm built was illegal.

This sentiment came out during the cross-examination, when defense attorney Brian Klein raised his voice — asking Werlau if one reason to make pools immutable would be to make them less subject to hacks.

That could reduce the ways a pool could be attacked, Werlau acknowledged.

Klein then asked Werlau if he provides personal info when he uses the Ethereum blockchain.

As Werlau paused to think, Klein rephrased, almost shouting: “There’s nothing like the registry you proposed, is there?”

“That is correct.”

Werlau, seemingly uncomfortable with the confrontation, looked up at the clock. A break for lunch was not far off.

The scene and the stakes

This writer sat 20 or so feet from Storm over the last two days, even passing him during breaks en route to the bathroom and elsewhere. The Tornado Cash founder appears calm, but walks with pace.

Sitting next to Axel on the courtroom’s left side, Storm often gazes toward the judge, stand and jury, stone-faced, blinking infrequently behind his glasses. Occasionally, he will scribble something on a Post-It and hand it to a member of his defense team. This writer did not once see Storm roll his eyes or shake his head.

Trial attendance ranged from roughly a dozen to two dozen people on Tuesday and Wednesday — meaning there are plenty of empty seats.

While not as high-profile a case as the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, Blockchain Association legal head Marisa Coppel noted its outcome will shape how developers, regulators and policymakers navigate the future of crypto innovation.

“A conviction could set a dangerous precedent by criminalizing the act of writing and publishing open-source code, amplifying fears among US developers and pushing innovation offshore,” she told Blockworks. “An acquittal, by contrast, may reaffirm that software creation alone isn’t a crime and could help restore confidence in building decentralized tools.”

Keep an eye on Blockworks for more Roman Storm trial updates.

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