@rstormsf

There’s a lot I could point to about how wrong this whole case is. But right now, the immediate need is covering the legal bills. Folks, if you’re able to donate, help end this dangerous precedent—one that will affect every software developer, founder, protocol, project, and wallet. Please, donate to my legal defense fund at https://t.co/aCPTvkXT98

🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️ 🙏 I'm Roman Storm. To @ethereum, and to everyone who has stood with me through this - thank you. Truly. When you're a developer facing decades in prison for writing open-source code, the nights get very long. And then this community shows up. Again and again. And I remember I'm not alone. That's everything. 💚 Let me be clear about what this case actually is. I didn't rob anyone. I didn't steal, didn't touch a single user's funds, never took custody of a single coin. I wrote software. Privacy software - the kind of thing that, in any sane world, belongs on a résumé. Not in an indictment. 🧑‍💻 So I want to tell you why, even now, I have every reason to keep fighting. Because this isn't blind hope. The courts have already started to speak - and what they said has a name. Van Loon. 📜 In November 2024, a federal appeals court - the Fifth Circuit - looked at what the government did to Tornado Cash and said it plainly: government broke the law. OFAC overstepped its authority when it sanctioned the protocol. Those immutable smart contracts aren't "property" that belongs to anyone. ⚖️ Sit with the court's own words, because they're extraordinary. The judges described Tornado Cash's contracts as "unownable, uncontrollable, and unchangeable — even by [their] creators." 🤯 Uncontrollable. Even by their creators. A federal court, after studying the actual technology, found that I literally cannot control the code I helped write. It runs on its own. It always will. No one can stop it - not me, not OFAC, not anyone. That's not a loophole. That's just how it works. And the government's own position has since crumbled. After Van Loon, OFAC removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list entirely in March 2025. The protocol they once branded a national-security threat - delisted, out in the open. ❌ And yet they're still prosecuting me. So look closely at what they're actually holding against me - because the harder you look, the thinner it gets. 🔍 My team integrated Chainalysis's official OFAC sanctions screening directly into the Tornado Cash interface - a real-time compliance measure to block sanctioned addresses. The government's response to that? They called it "window dressing." Compliance, dismissed as decoration. 🙃 Then there are my own words, from my own chats, reacting to hackers getting traced: "I'm glad those fuckers are detected." That's the person they're branding a criminal conspirator. The story and the evidence don't match - because the story isn't true. 💔 And once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere. A court says the protocol is uncontrollable even by its creator - yet they want to jail me for "controlling" it. That's the kind of case this is. It gets worse. ⬇️ The indictment's most-quoted line - a dramatic "how do you go about laundering $600 million?" - was pitched as a co-founder's words. It wasn't. It was written by a CoinDesk reporter asking the team how mixers work. A forwarded message got mislabeled in the data extraction. A journalist's question became Exhibit A. 📰 Then the most damning of all: on the very day I was indicted, FinCEN officials privately told these SDNY prosecutors that non-custodial tools like this are NOT money services businesses. The prosecutors walked into court and argued the opposite. My defense didn't learn about it for ~21 months. ⚖️ Even the DOJ doesn't seem to believe its own theory. Weeks before insisting I'm guilty, the same DOJ told the Supreme Court - in its amicus brief in Cox Communications v. Sony Music — that "knowledge that a buyer plans to misuse a product with substantial legitimate uses, without more, does not support an inference of culpable intent." The exact opposite of what they argue against me. Same DOJ. Weeks apart. 🔁 https://t.co/cRoJAQZwB8 So step back. If you only hear "crypto mixer," you might assume the worst. But this is not a shadowy contraption. It's mainstream, studied, respected technology. 🎓 Stanford teaches Tornado Cash — not as a cautionary tale, but as the textbook example of how cryptographic privacy works. It's a final-exam question in CS251, Dan Boneh's renowned cryptography course. 📚 https://t.co/2A77txqf4g https://t.co/65jdsOEtuw And Stanford's own exam notes something the prosecutors won't: Tornado Cash ships a built-in compliance tool, letting a user voluntarily prove which deposit was theirs to satisfy an exchange like Coinbase. Privacy and compliance, designed to coexist. 🔎 This isn't fringe, either. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a primer on Tornado Cash for economists and policymakers - treating it as legitimate financial-privacy infrastructure, and describing that very same compliance tool. 🏦 https://t.co/d6orD3ydQT ers So add it all up. Technology taught at Stanford. Analyzed by the Federal Reserve. Vindicated in a federal court of appeals. Built with real-time sanctions screening the government waved off as "window dressing." And the developer who helped build it - me, is facing prison. Tell me that sits right. 😞 This is why it reaches so far beyond me. If publishing neutral, open code makes you a criminal for whatever a stranger later does with it, every developer here is exposed. Every wallet team. Every protocol. Everyone who's ever pushed to a public repo. 🧨 Privacy is not a crime. Open source is not a conspiracy. Writing software is not the same as committing the acts of those who misuse it. The easiest principles in the world to defend - which is exactly why we can't afford to lose them here. 🛡️ Van Loon is the law catching up to the truth. Now I deserve the same justice the protocol already received. We're close. The arguments are strong. And with you behind me, we can finish this. 💪 So please — follow my co-founder in this fight @alex_pertsev, and share our stories. And if you're able, support my legal defense at 👉 https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn 💚 Every voice, every dollar, every repost tells a court — and tells me — that I don't stand alone. I'm Roman Storm. We started this together. Let's end it together. 🌪️ 🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️

My Rule 29 motion to acquit hasn't even been ruled on yet. (Rule 29 = I'm asking the judge to throw out all the counts - including the one I was convicted on - because the evidence wasn't enough to convict. If granted, there's nothing left to retry.) But SDNY already filed to lock in a schedule for a second trial - new expert witnesses and all. After failing to convict me once, they're not backing down. They're doubling down. I want to be clear about one thing: I am not giving up. Not now, not after a second trial, not ever. But I can't do this alone. If you believe in this fight, I'd be grateful for your support - please donate if you can. https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn Yesterday’s SDNY filing: https://t.co/V7RoHkCizl

I hate asking for money. But that’s how the system works. Legal defense isn’t free, and I need the community’s help to keep fighting. Please donate, share, or retweet → https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn Until this case is dismissed, building DeFi - protocols, UIs, tooling carries real legal risk for everyone in this space. The outcome here affects all of us.

Support the battle if you can. Free Roman Storm (.) com https://t.co/9kdwRb817j