The Ethereum Foundation has pledged $500,000 toward the legal defence of Roman Storm, co-founder and developer of Tornado Cash, who is set to stand trial on July 14, 2025. This pledge brings the total defence fund to $1.25 million, with $750,000 already raised by the crypto community to support Storm.
Storm faces charges of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and violating U.S. sanctions by developing and maintaining the Tornado Cash protocol.
Prosecutors claim that the crypto-mixing tool was used by cybercriminals, including North Korean hackers, to launder stolen digital assets and that its developers failed to implement adequate safeguards to prevent such misuse.
The trial comes at a time when U.S. regulatory views on crypto privacy tools are undergoing significant debate. Within the crypto community, the charges have sparked widespread backlash.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others argue that building open-source privacy tools should not be criminalised. The Ethereum Foundation echoed this view, stating, “The right to privacy is not a crime, and writing open-source code is not illegal.”
Several crypto advocacy organisations, including Coin Centre, the DeFi Education Fund, and the Blockchain Association, have voiced their support for Storm.
Meanwhile, Roman Semenov, a co-defendant in the same case, remains a fugitive and is believed to be in Russia. Alexey Pertsev, another developer affiliated with Tornado Cash, was convicted in the Netherlands in May 2024 and sentenced to more than five years in prison for money laundering.
The outcome of Storm’s trial is expected to set a key precedent for how the U.S. legal system treats developers of decentralised, privacy-focused crypto protocols.
