This is, in my view, for the first time, the United States government saying,

the developer of an open source immutable smart contract protocol

should go to prison for how someone else abused that protocol even though there was nothing you could do to stop it.

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.

This is Ryan Sean Adams. David's out today, so I'm here to help you become more

bankless.

Pretty hard to go bankless if they make it illegal to go bankless. On Friday, September 26th, a US judge ruled that, quote,

control of funds was not necessary, end quote, for money transmitter laws to apply to the tornado cash developer

Roman Storm.

This is a court case I'm referencing that we've talked about a number of times on Bankless.

If you're not familiar with it, we get into some of the details

in today's episode. The question I had when I heard about this was, did they just make

Defe facto illegal in the United States, the development of Defy? This is a

terrifying precedent regardless and it really begs the question, do all Defy

developers become criminals if criminals use their code? Are D-5 protocols

now unregistered money transmitters? And what would that mean? Is the

Department of Justice waging a war on money laundering or are they trying to wage a broader war on privacy and all forms

of decentralized crypto.

Crypto lawyer Jake Chivinsky is our guest today and he shed some light on all of these questions. We've called this

tornado cash case the most important case in history so far of our fight for

crypto freedoms. I think it'll answer questions like can code be sanctioned by governments? Can crypto developers be

arrested at the whim of an enforcement official? That's what's at stake in this

...