By Mark Hunter
6 months agoTue Jul 22 2025 07:54:18
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Roman Storm’s legal team has said they are considering filing for a mistrial
A government witness claimed scam proceeds were laundered through Tornado Cash
Independent researchers have disputed that claim, citing a lack of on-chain evidence
Roman Storm’s defense attorneys have raised the possibility of a mistrial after discovering that funds said to have been laundered through Tornado Cash probably weren’t. A witness in the trial, Hanfeng Lin, testified that the blockchain recovery firm Payback had traced her stolen assets to the mixer, but Storm’s team challenged the validity of that claim, citing their own investigation and the work of well-known blockchain analysts who found no such connection on-chain. As a result, they are considering pushing for a mistrial, although no decision has been taken yet.
Blockchain Analysts Followed “Wrong Path”
Hanfeng Lin testified on Tuesday, during the second week of the Tornado Cash trial in federal court in Manhattan. Her testimony marked the prosecution’s first presentation of a victim of a pig-butchering crypto scam, detailing how she lost approximately $190,000–$250,000 and believed a portion of those funds passed through Tornado Cash. However, crypto researchers ZachXBT and Taylor Monahan publicly reviewed the transactions linked to Lin’s case and concluded there was no evidence the funds ever passed through Tornado Cash:
Finally got time to review the txns you shared and I agree.
Idk how you mess up the tracing that bad as a firm to where you couldn’t properly follow instant exchange deposits 1 hop from a theft address and then follow subsequent txns down the wrong path to Tornado…
It’s…
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) July 21, 2025
Defense lawyers presented these findings in court and argued that allowing such unsupported testimony could mislead the jury and undermine the fairness of the trial. They have not yet submitted a formal mistrial motion but told the judge they are actively considering it.
Prosecution Promises New Evidence
The prosecution, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Thane Rehn, has pushed back, promising to bring forward new evidence and witnesses to support their version of events, with Rehn adding that the government will introduce additional on-chain data showing the scam funds were indeed mixed using Tornado Cash. Monahan added that “the state will absolutely need to show that their investigators did not wholly rely on a single bad-faith letter from an identified scam crypto recovery service,” although he doubted whether any federal agent is “willing to go on the stand and testify they verified the trace.”
The outcome of this evidentiary dispute could be pivotal in a case that has wide implications for open-source developers and crypto privacy tools; Roman Storm is charged with conspiracy to violate sanctions and operating an unlicensed money transmitter, and the trial is being closely watched by both the crypto community and digital rights advocates.
