The Roman Storm, Tornado Cash Co-Founder and Developer, found interest in computer software at a young age after his parents bought him a personal computer.
Now, at 36 years old, he holds a guilty verdict for running an unlicensed business that sends money, issued by a jury on Wednesday. He stays in Limbo because prosecutors can still try him with two additional Felony counts: conspiracy to make money losses and conspiracy to violate US penalties.
The storm is always drawn to the “more technical side of things,” he Says In a podcast in early July, before his trial began in a New York district court. He spent time playing video games and teaching himself how computer and software programs worked.
When connected to the Internet, that early interest expands – gives him access to other countries and cultures. Over time, the storm has been attracted to libertarian values that will eventually lead to the creation of Tornado Cash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzodbdbiuw
From Russia to the United States
According to In the LinkedIn profile of the Storm, he studied metalurgical engineering at South Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, Russia, from 2006 to 2008. His activities include physics, math and chemistry, and the main in his later profession: programming. She taught himself, learning from open-source materials.
He wants to immigrate In the US from Russia in 2008. By his entry, it was a difficult time. “You don’t really know how to get it out here,” he said during the podcast. “And just grind. You’re in a hurry. You try to find out.”
In the beginning, he worked strange jobs. Eventually, he was accepted as a software engineer, and the climb occurred quickly: his public resume featured quality assurance duties in Cisco and a senior position at a starting cloud storage. His last position in the corporate world was in Seattle, where he worked as a software engineer for Amazon for a few months.
Related: Roman Storm lifeline asks $ 1.5M as Tornado Cash Trial Presses on
Crypto startups and the Genesis of Tornado Cash
By August 2017, Storm stopped at Amazon and started a job as a blockchain developer. He has focused on the Ethereum Ecosystem, writing a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) solid contract and code for ERC-20 tokens.
Just three months later, he became the Chief Officer of POA Network technology, an Ethereum sidechain that relies on a mechanism of consent-of-the-truth. After nearly a year there, he founded Peppersec, a consulting agency for security and custom development.
During his time at Peppersec, he saw Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Blerin, who clapped him on the pressing issue of ecosystem privacy. That became an impetus for the prototype that would eventually become a tornado cash.
“The Ethereum community requires a privacy tool for many legitimate reasons,” Storm said There is no bank in an interview. “Many events happened at the time involved in our team starting to work here.”
From code to court room
The storm was one of the three founders of Tornado Cash in 2019, a cryptocurrency mixer that allows users to engage in the unreliable transfer of digital ownership.
“Tornado Cash has been converted to customers that it has provided unreliable and unidentified financial transactions,” the United States Department of Justice Says In a statement following his guilty verdict, claiming that the storm was “personally aware of” the use of a criminal platform to send illicit proceedings of more than $ 1 billion.
“Eventually, the STORM and his co-founders were able to cash out more than $ 12 million income from the banned money sending business,” the DOJ said.
The storm was accused of August 2023 on charges including money laundering, running an unlicensed business delivery business, and conspiracy to violate us. Penalty. He begged him not to sin and in bail.
Over the past few months, he has changed his X profile to describe himself as “a proud US citizen” who is targeted by Biden and SDNY administration for writing an open resource code. “
Storm was convicted Wednesday of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed business that sends money, bringing a maximum sentence of five years to prison.
The jury did not reach a verdict on the remaining charges related to money laundering and North Korean penalties, offenses that could add up to 40 years to Storm’s judgment if he was found guilty of a potential second test.
According to legal experts, the US government is still the choice to retry the storm on unresolved charges. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) will decide in the coming days if it wants to try the charges on a new test,” Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer at the Venture Capital Firm Variant Fund, write In X.
The outcome of the STORM test is expected to set the predecessors for how US courts treat digital privacy cases and open-source software developers.
Magazine: Tornado Cash 2.0 – The race to produce safe and legal coin mixers
