The founder of Tornado Cash has asked that the money laundering charges be dismissed

Roman Storm, co-founder of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency exchange, has filed a motion to dismiss all three counts of money laundering and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

In a March 29 filing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Storm's attorneys said in a March 29 petition that Mr. Storm conspired to misappropriate the funds.

Storm's attorneys have argued that Tornado Cash was created, “became immutable” and publicly available before being used by US Treasury Department-sanctioned hacking groups.

Thus, at the time of the offense, there was little Storm could do to prevent the sanctioned party from exploiting it.

The indictment centers around allegations that Tornado Cash facilitated North Korea's Lazarus group's efforts to circumvent U.S. sanctions and finance the country's regime's nuclear program.

In addition, the lawyers argued that Tornado Cash is not a money transfer business, because it does not charge a fee to transfer money, and users have exclusive control over crypto.

Arguing that Storm intended to build software solutions to provide financial privacy to law-abiding crypto users, he said the allegations were “grossly wrong and should be dismissed.”

In September 2023, Cointelegraph reported that Storm pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on a $2 million bond shortly after his arrest and is restricted from traveling outside certain states of New York, New Jersey, Washington, and California.

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This comes as the US government continues its crackdown on crypto-mixing services.

In the year On March 12, Cointelegraph reported that the founder of Bitcoin Fog, a $400 million crypto-mingling service, was charged with money laundering.

Roman Sterlilov was found guilty of money laundering, money laundering conspiracy, operating an unauthorized money transmitter business, and violating the DC Money Transmitters Act.

However, the crypto community sees great value in crypto mixers as they can provide privacy measures and confidentiality for those who want to make anonymous trades for legal reasons.

At one point, Arbitrum DAO considered allocating approximately $1.3 million in ARB tokens to fund Storm's legal expenses. However, the proposal was withdrawn, and the reason for its withdrawal is still unknown.

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