Roman Storm, co-founder of crypto-mixing platform Tornado Cash, hopes to have charges against him dropped after sanctions against his software were dropped.

In Storm’s Dec. 18 motion to dismiss, he cites the recent Fifth Circuit ruling that the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) overstepped by sanctioning Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts. The ruling recognized that autonomous software that no one controls cannot be classified as property.

The ruling, the document reads, “makes clear that there is no deliberate action Mr. Storm could have taken here.” Furthermore, “the developers’ lack of control over the proceeds renders them legally incapable of conspiring to commit money laundering and negates the knowledge element of a money laundering charge.”

“Tornado Cash is difficult to control due to the immutable nature of smart contracts,” Stephen Ajayi, dApp Audit Technical Lead at blockchain cybersecurity firm Hacken, told Decrypt. “It is fully decentralized, globally accessible, and hard to censor on Ethereum, which is the core principle of decentralization.”

Those points are purportedly compounded by the appeals court finding that smart contracts “are not the ‘property’ of a foreign national or enti

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Author: Stacy Elliott