BITCOIN SEASON 2: The Tornado Cash Trial, Explained
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Reporter David Morris breaks down the Tornado Cash trial, Roman Storm's conviction on money transmission charges, and what this means for crypto privacy and open source developers going forward.
David Z Morris joins us to talk about his extensive coverage of the Tornado Cash trial. We dive deep into Roman Storm's conviction, the legal precedent for privacy tools, and the chilling effects on open source development in crypto.
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NOTES:
• Jury hung on 2 charges, guilty on 1 MTB charge
• North Korea Lazarus laundered $600M
• No direct OFAC-sanctioned wallets used the service
• Appeal process could take years to resolve
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
00:41 Why the Tornado Cash Story?
05:06 What is Tornado Cash?
11:15 What does Tornado Cash Do?
14:01 Autonomous Smart Contracts
19:34 Run as a Business
23:57 Profits
24:58 Criminal Charges
31:43 Future of Open Source Development
37:15 Advice for Privacy Devs
42:43 Public Perception
46:09 Journalism & Privacy
49:10 What Happens Now?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to Bitcoin Season 2. |
| 0:01.5 | I've got David Z. Morris, independent tech reporter, contributor to the rage and author of Stealing the Future. |
| 0:10.6 | It's a book about SVF. |
| 0:19.0 | Welcome to Bitcoin Season 2. David. Thanks for coming on. |
| 0:21.8 | Thanks so much for having me. |
| 0:23.0 | Excited to be here. |
| 0:24.2 | So we're going to talk about tornado cash. |
| 0:26.4 | You've covered this. |
| 0:27.5 | You're one of the primary people covering this. |
| 0:30.3 | And we'll explain some of the basics. |
| 0:31.5 | But I want to just ask you, like you're an independent reporter. |
| 0:37.8 | You kind of get to choose what you cover and talk about. |
| 0:42.0 | What initially drew you to the tornado cash story and why are you covering it? |
| 0:47.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:48.3 | Well, big complicated answer. |
| 0:51.9 | I mean, I think that there's two layers there. |
| 0:53.5 | One is just the interest and importance and, you know, relative to everybody else. |
| 0:58.8 | We, I don't know exactly why my intuition told me this, but once we got there and started covering it, you know, there were a couple of other crypto magazines, Bitcoin magazine sent somebody, Coin desk sent somebody, but even they were only there, |
| 1:11.7 | you know, a few days out of the trial. DL News, props to them, they sent somebody who was there |
| 1:17.3 | quite a lot. But I was the only person, I missed one day of the trial. I was there almost every single |
| 1:23.1 | day. And that is a rare opportunity to get to do something that in depth. |
| 1:29.4 | You know, I've done it previously for SBF. |
... |
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