Whenever you send crypto from your wallet to another wallet, your transaction is recorded on a blockchain. In the case of $ETH, the blockchain is called Ethereum. Like many other blockchains, it also publicly records user transactions.

This means anyone: friend, competitor, or government, can trace your financial history in seconds. Now, that’s great for transparency. But it’s terrible for privacy. Anyone with your wallet address can see how much you hold, what you spend, and who you transact with.

A way to use blockchain without exposing your entire financial history to the world had to exist. In 2019, a team of developers launched Tornado Cash to solve this problem. Roman Storm was one of them.

Tornado Cash used a cryptographic method called “zero-knowledge proofs” to break the link between a sender and a receiver. You’d deposit crypto into the Tornado pool, and later withdraw it to a different address without anyone being able to trace the two transactions together.

It wasn’t a “company” in the traditional sense. It was open-source code, deployed on Ethereum, that anyone could use. There was no “delete” button, no off-switch. The moment it went live, it was unstoppable.

Privacy advocates loved it. For journalists, activists, and anyone operating under oppressive regimes, Tornado Cash offered financial privacy in a space where everything is normally exposed.

For everyday users, it was a way to donate to causes, move funds, or make payments without revealing personal financial history. But hackers loved it too. North Korean cybercrime groups, DeFi hackers, and scammers began using Tornado Cash to launder stolen crypto.

Billions of dollars flowed through it, most of it likely legitimate, but the illegal use cases drew headlines. In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash, claiming it was a tool for money laundering.

Now, here's the shocker. They didn’t just go after the bad actors using it, they went after the code itself. Just after the sanction, one of the founders, Alexey Pertsev, was arrested in Netherlands.

In 2023, the FBI raided Roman Storm's house and arrested him while his 3-year-old daughter watched. His charges? →Conspiracy to commit money laundering. →Conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, and →Conspiracy to violate sanctions.

If convicted, he could face up to 45 years in prison. Storm’s defense is simple: He wrote code that anyone could use. He didn’t run the service, control who used it, or profit from illegal activity. But prosecutors argue he knew criminals abused it and didn't "stop them".

On August 6, 2025, a jury delivered a partial verdict on Roman Storm's case. He was found guilty of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. But the more serious money laundering and sanctions evasion charges are yet to be decided upon.

This thread aims to further help bring the unjust actions of the government towards a developer whose only crime is writing open-source code, into limelight. It also aims to uncover a very harsh truth.

Crypto has a fundamental PR problem. Illegitimate transactions make up a fraction of the industry’s activity yet they dominate the headlines enough to instigate a developer's arrest. For the record, cash is still more widely used for money laundering compared to crypto.

Meanwhile, builders creating truly valuable products stay silent, letting others define the narrative for them. And in that silence, everyone starts to believe crypto is only scams, hacks, and rug pulls, when in reality, the technology’s potential is far bigger.

If you’re building something meaningful in this space, understand this, silence is a luxury you can’t afford. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. And they may tell it in a way that doesn't serve you.

We know how to help companies go viral in 2025 across social media platforms. We've generated over 1,000,000,000 impressions for our clients over the last 2.5 years. DM us to work together. https://www.swipelabs.io

@swipelabscrypto Anybody who enables privacy is an enemy of any government. Don’t know about law , but Tornado went clearly against the Masterplan to make everybody naked.

@swipelabscrypto @AlexThinkBright I’m here for the Jawline, arrested for being a real life GigaChad