Roman Storm, the Tornado Cash co-founder and developer, found an 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 operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, issued by a jury on Wednesday. He remains in limbo as prosecutors could still retry him on two additional felony counts: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate US sanctions.
Storm has always been drawn to “the more technical side of things,” he said on a podcast in early July, just before his trial began in a New York district court. He spent time playing video games and teaching himself how computer programs and software worked.
Once connected to the internet, that early interest expanded — giving him access to other countries and cultures. Over time, Storm became attracted to the libertarian values that would eventually lead to the creation of Tornado Cash.
From Russia to the United States
According to Storm’s LinkedIn profile, he studied metallurgical engineering at South Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, Russia, from 2006 to 2008. His activities included physics, mathematics and chemistry, and the precursor to his later profession: programming. He was self-taught, learning from open-source materials.
He’d immigrate to the US from Russia in 2008. By his admission, it was a challenging time. “You really don’t know anything how to make it out here,” he said during the podcast. “And you just grind, you hustle, you try to figure it out.”
At the beginning, he worked odd jobs. Eventually, he was hired as a software engineer, and the climb happened quickly: His public resume features roles in quality assurance at Cisco and a senior position at a cloud storage startup. His last position in the corporate world was in Seattle, where he worked as a software engineer for Amazon for a few months.
Crypto startups and the genesis of Tornado Cash
By August 2017, Storm had quit Amazon and started work as a blockchain developer. He became focused on the Ethereum ecosystem, writing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Solidity contracts and code for ERC-20 tokens.
Just three months later, he became the chief technology officer of POA Network, an Ethereum sidechain that relies on a proof-of-authority consensus mechanism. After almost a year there, he founded PepperSec, a consulting agency for security audits and custom development.
During his time at PepperSec, he came across Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who clued him into the pressing issue of privacy in the ecosystem. That became the impetus for the prototype that would later become Tornado Cash.
“The Ethereum community had been in need of a privacy tool for a lot of very legitimate reasons,” Storm told Bankless in an interview. “Several events happened at the time that involved our team starting to work on it.”
The Tornado Cash “washing machine” T-shirt at the 2019 ETHBoston event. Source: Web3Auth
From code to court room
Storm was one of the three founders of Tornado Cash in 2019, a cryptocurrency mixer that allowed users to engage in untraceable transfers of digital assets.
“Tornado Cash advertised to customers that it provided untraceable and anonymous financial transactions,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement following his guilty verdict, claiming that Storm was “personally aware” of the platform’s use by criminals to transmit illicit proceedings totaling more than $1 billion.
“Ultimately, STORM and his co-founders were able to cash out more than $12 million in profits from the illicit money transmitting business,” the DOJ said.
Storm was indicted in August 2023 on charges including money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmission business, and conspiracy to violate US. sanctions. He pleaded not guilty and was out on bail.
Over the past few months, he changed his X profile to describe himself as “a proud United States citizen” who was “targeted by Biden’s administration and SDNY for writing open source code.”
Source: Roman Storm
Storm was convicted Wednesday of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
The jury did not reach a verdict on the remaining charges related to money laundering and North Korea sanctions, offenses that could add up to 40 years to Storm’s sentencing if he’s found guilty in a potential second trial.
According to legal experts, the US government has still the option to retry Storm on the unresolved charges. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) will decide in the coming days if it wants to retry those charges in a new trial,” Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer at venture capital firm Variant Fund, wrote on X.
Storm’s trial outcome is expected to set precedents for how US courts treat digital privacy cases and open-source software developers.
