Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, August 7th, and today we are talking about the verdict in the Roman Storm trial.

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All right, friends, well, a hung jury leads to a mixed ending in the Roman Storm trial.

For the past two weeks, the tornado cash developer has been on trial in the Southern District

of New York. Prosecutors brought three charges, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed

money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit

money laundering, and sanctions violations. The trial has been fairly convoluted and controversial.

Early on, the prosecutors were criticized for introducing witnesses that seemed to have very

little connection to tornado cash. Their main strategy was to parade a string of victims and

convicted fraudsters before the jury

to demonstrate that illicit use of Tornado Cash was widespread. However, the very first witness,

the victim of a phony investment scheme, appeared to have only a very tenuous link to the case.

The person who defrauded her had not used Tornado Cash to launder the funds. Her only real

evidence was that she emailed an

unmonitored tornado cash email address asking for her money back, together with dozens of

exchanges in crypto companies. Later in the prosecution's case, FBI chain tracers acknowledged that

they couldn't prove her funds had ever touched tornado cash. The point was to demonstrate that

Roman Storm was aware the protocol was used by criminals.

However, it was never made clear what he could have done about that, given that the protocol was already deployed as an immutable smart contract.

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