Reported by Alexander Osipovich

Early one morning in August 2023, federal agents swept into Roman Storm’s home in a wooded suburb of Seattle to arrest him at gunpoint.

The 35-year-old software developer is set to go on trial this summer in a case that cryptocurrency advocates consider a key test for the legal treatment of blockchain technology.

Storm and two other developers co-founded Tornado Cash, a “mixer” used to obfuscate the movement of digital funds. He says its goal was to enable financial privacy.

It also enabled more sinister activity. The Justice Department has alleged that criminals, including Lazarus Group, a U.S.-sanctioned North Korean cybercrime organization, used Tornado Cash to launder more than $1 billion of illicit assets.

Storm told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that most of Tornado Cash’s users were legitimate. He called the service a neutral piece of software that could be used for both good and bad purposes.

“Hackers and bad actors use Microsoft Excel,” he said, speaking by Zoom from the same house in Auburn, Wash., where he was arrested a year and half ago. “Should Microsoft developers feel bad for what they’ve done? I think no.”

Read full version: https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/a-crypto-coders-invention-was-used-by-north-korean-hackers-did-he-commit-a-crime-df73c304