Tornado Cash co-founder and developer Rome Storm discovered interest in computer software when he was young after his parents bought him a personal computer.
Now, at the age of 36, he held a guilty verdict for an unlicensed currency delivery business issued by a jury on Wednesday. He is still in trouble because prosecutors can still retry the statistics of two other felony counts: conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions.
The storm has always been attracted by the “more technical side of things.” explain On the podcast in early July, just before he began his trial in the New York District Court. He spent a lot of time playing video games and taught himself how computer programs and software work.
Once connected with the internet, early interest expands – allowing him to enter other countries and cultures. Over time, the storm is attracted by the values of liberals, which will eventually lead to the creation of a tornado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzodbdbiuw
From Russia to the United States
according to From 2006 to 2008, he studied metallurgical engineering at the Southern Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, Russia. His activities included physics, mathematics and chemistry, and his later career pioneers: Programming: Programming. He is self-taught and learns from open source materials.
He will migrant For the 2008 Russian and American, he was admitted that it was a challenging time. “You really know nothing,” he said in the podcast. “And you’re just grinding, you’re busy, you’re trying to figure it out.”
At the beginning, he worked as a odd job. Eventually, he was hired as a software engineer, and the climb happened soon: his public resume played a role in Cisco’s quality assurance and senior positions in cloud storage startups. His last position in the corporate world was in Seattle, where he worked as a software engineer at Amazon for several months.
Related: Rome Storm asks for $1.5 million in lifeline as Tornado Cash Trial presses
Crypto startups and the origins of tornado cash
By August 2017, Storm had withdrawn from Amazon and began working as a blockchain developer. He focused on the Ethereum ecosystem and wrote decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) solid contracts and code for ERC-20 tokens.
Just three months later, he became the chief technology officer of POA Network, a Sidechain of Ethereum that relies on a consensus mechanism of proof of authorization. Almost a year later there, he founded Peppersec, a security audit and custom development consulting agency.
While at Peppersec, he met Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who stuck him into pressing privacy issues in the ecosystem. This became the driving force behind the prototype and later became tornado cash.
“The Ethereum community needs a privacy tool for many very legitimate reasons.” Tell There is no shore in the interview. “There was some activity at that time and our team started working hard.”
From the code to the court room
Storm is one of the three founders of Tornado Cash in 2019, a cryptocurrency mixer that allows users to engage in untraceable transfer of digital assets.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s “Tornado Cash promotes clients that it provides financial transactions that are untrackable and anonymous.” explain In a statement following his guilty verdict, it was claimed that the storm was “personally aware” of the use of criminals in illegal lawsuits that had been transmitted totaling more than $1 billion.
“Ultimately, Storm and his co-founders were able to cash out more than $12 million in profits from the illegal currency transfer business,” the Justice Department said.
Storm was indicted in August 2023, which included money laundering, operating an unlicensed currency transfer business and conspiring to violate us. Sanctions. He pleaded not guilty and was released on bail.
Over the past few months, he has changed his profile to describe himself as “a proud American citizen” who is “targeted by Biden’s administration and SDNY’s open source code.”
storm Convicted on Wednesday Conspiracy to operate an unlicensed currency transfer business can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The jury has not ruled on the remaining charges related to money laundering and North Korean sanctions, which could add up to 40 years of crimes if he found guilty in a potential second trial.
According to legal experts, the U.S. government Still have the option to try the storm again On unresolved allegations. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) will decide in the coming days whether to retry the charges in the new trial,” said Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer of Venture Capital’s Variant Fund, Write On X.
The results of Storm’s trial are expected to set precedents for how U.S. courts deal with digital privacy cases and open source software developers.
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