Roman Storm Speaks - Tornado Cash Developer on What’s at Stake

We have a sobering episode today on Bankless.

We have Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on the podcast today. Now, Roman, you might remember, he was arrested from his Seattle home just over a year ago. This was in August of 2023. He was arrested for the development and deployment of Tornado Cash, which we've talked about on Bankless as an open source code. It was developed on Ethereum and it provides privacy for blockchain transactions. He now faces criminal charges in the United States and the prospects of decades in jail.

Now, David and I think Roman's case is the most important case for digital rights of the 2020s, this decade,

is code speech. If bad people use open source code to do bad things, do the developers of that code go to jail? Are U.S. citizens allowed to even have digital privacy over their economic transactions? All of those things are going to be decided in this case. And just also on a personal level, a man's life is at stake here.

As you can see in today's conversation, the full weight of the U.S. government is being leveraged to prosecute Roman Storm. And so there's a massive power asymmetry here to correct for.

Roman's case is coming up in April and he needs funds for his legal defense. He doesn't have the money to fight this alone. We're hoping the crypto community can step up to fund him. We gave him $25,000 to Roman's case in the beginning of this year. And so in addition to that, we are also giving him another $25,000 after this recording and hope that you will also, listener, join us to support Roman and also our own fight to have a right to privacy in crypto, because that is also what is at stake in this case.

I don't know if we will win this fight.

The fight for the right to use cryptography in the United States has a long history of legal battles, which have all dictated the future of freedom and privacy in the United States. This is one of those cases and a moment when the crypto industry has the opportunity to shape the future in a very big way on the shoulders of Roman Storm and his fight against government overreach.

So this is Roman Storm with his lawyer on the Tornado Cache case and what's at stake.

Bankless Station, I'm very pleased to introduce you to Roman Storm. He is the developer of Tornado Cash. We also have Carrie Curtis Alex. She is an attorney representing Roman's case at Waymaker. Carrie Roman, welcome to Bankless.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so we got a few questions for you today. Um, first, I just want to ask Roman on like a personal level, how are you feeling? Like how are your spirits just overall?

Hi, Brian. Hi, David.

Hi, people who is listening right now.

Thank you for asking. Honestly, every day I go

through a wide spectrum of emotions, from confident and energized

to isolated and frankly scared.

Let's face it, I

I find myself in a unique position with this federal indictment where I still struggle.

To understand, like, why did I get arrested?

And yet, my case will serve as a precedent for other programmers like myself.

It's a huge responsibility, to be honest,

uh, to carry this weight on my shoulders for over a year now.

But

what gives me hope is the support of our crypto community,

uh, both spiritual and of course financial.

Because my legal fight is

everyone's fight.

And to use Alexander Dumas' words that I like to quote all for one and one for all, right?

Uh Roman, uh people I think know you as the Tornado Cache developer. That's like how you are known in the space. Maybe you could just shed a little bit more light uh upon yourself. Who are you who are you and how'd you become a developer?

Okay, sure.

I may have shared this in the past, uh, but I think my journey towards software development began when my parents gifted me a computer at age about seven.

Now, this was a very unusual gift because my peers in post Soviet Russia weren't able to have computers until high school or even college age.

My parents were lower middle income, regular folks, but somehow they saw this potential in me, and I will be forever grateful to them for that.

Afterwards, I'll basically learn everything I could about computers. I'll fix broken hardware and assemble Frankenstein computers from random scraps.

I'll help my friends with software upgrades and virus protection until graduated

high school.

Later, I immigrated to the United States, specifically Silicon Valley, because I saw

it as a capital of tech innovation and I wanted to be in this environment.

After coming to the United States, I took programming courses at City College of San Francisco

and did everything I could to get better at programming.

I just wanted to solve problems that would improve people's lives.

I was living the American dream.

Uh you were living the American dream. Maybe, maybe that's in the in the past tense. Uh Roman, I'm I'm not sure what what that means now, but I I want to ask you on your developer journey, w why did you decide to develop Tornado Cash?

That's a very tough question.

But uh first,

my lawyers say I have to be very careful to say that when you say tornado cash,

I understand that you meant to refer to the software,

specifically the smart contracts,

which

people call the tornado cache pools.

And there have been a lot of interviews where I've told the story, but in short,

The Ethereum community

had been in need of a privacy tool for a lot of very legitimate reasons.

Several events happened at the time that involved our team

starting to work on it.

And

I'm sure your listeners have heard

that I met with Alec Butyrin at uh if New York Hackathon, who suggested it.