Roman Storm’s defense challenges the use of compromised evidence in the Tornado Cash money laundering trial.
The legal case against Roman Storm, co-founder of the Tornado Cash mixing protocol, took a turn on the eve of the trial set for July 14. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York mistakenly attributed a Telegram message from a CoinDesk journalist to Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, using the alleged evidence to suggest the team’s “consciousness of guilt.”
The prosecutors’ mistake
During a hearing on July 8, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Arad cited a message that appeared to come from Pertsev: “Heya, anyone around to chat about axie? Would like to ask a few general questions about how one goes about cashing out 600 mil.” The message referred to the $600 million exploit of the Ronin bridge connected to blockchain-based game Axie Infinity.
However, Storm’s defense demonstrated through official documents that the message had originally been written by Andrew Thurman, then a senior reporter at CoinDesk, and was later forwarded by Pertsev in a separate Tornado Cash chat. This misattribution raised serious concerns about the integrity of the evidence presented by the prosecution.
Consequences of the error
The mistake emerged because the original version of the Telegram messages extracted and provided to the defense in September 2023 did not include the “forwarded” tag on forwarded messages. Prosecutors admitted the error and supplied the corrected version to the defense in December 2024, stating this is the version they intend to use in the trial against Tornado Cash.
Storm’s defense used the mistake to request the exclusion of all Telegram chat evidence from Pertsev’s phone from the trial, expressing “serious concerns about the integrity of the grand jury proceedings.”
Alexey Pertsev, Tornado Cash developer, has already been sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court for facilitating money laundering through the protocol.
The defense rejected claims that they strategically delayed their motion until the last minute, stressing that the government itself had not disclosed when it became aware of the issue. Prosecutors apologized for having produced the original messages without the forwarding information but asked the judge to deny the defense’s motion to exclude the evidence.
