🔐 Digital privacy is a right

Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm is currently free after his trial ended in a split earlier this month.

Journalist David Z. Morris was there. On today’s Supply Shock podcast episode, he recounts his experience.

Morris told host Pete Rizzo that the state’s first witness was a mess. A romance-scam victim was linked to Tornado via a “recovery” firm later shown to be unreliable; a government tracer used a LIFO (last in, first out) heuristic and admitted it didn’t actually prove her money hit Tornado. 

That undercut the narrative that the mixer primarily served criminals. Over the trial window, identified illicit flow was a minority of volume.

“They’re trying to shoehorn these people who are not in that intermediary role into the legal responsibility of having the intermediary role because they want to put it on somebody,” Morris said.

What’s next: The DOJ must decide whether to retry the two hung counts. Sentencing on the lone conviction hasn’t been set and an appeal is likely, but as Morris put it: "There is definitely a world where this gets appealed and thrown out and [Storm] remains free.”

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

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