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Roman Storm, co-founder of the popular cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, appeared before the judge today.
Storm and co-founder Roman Semenov were arrested in August on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a 20-year prison sentence.
Appearing before the judge today, Roman Storm said in New York District Court that he pleaded not guilty to the charges of conspiracy to facilitate money laundering and evasion of sanctions.
Apart from this, Roman Strorm, a dual US and Russian citizen, was released on $2 million bail.
At this point, the Tornado Cash co-founder will remain under house arrest in his Washington home and submit to regular drug testing.
Storm was also allowed to travel to certain areas to attend hearings.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, along with core developer Ameen Soleimani, researcher Jacob Illum from analytics firm Chainalytic, and academics Matthias Nadler and Fabian Schar, wrote a joint article called “Privacy Pools.”
Here, the authors, who worked on a platform that could be a potential alternative to Tornado Cash, claimed that this platform could coexist with financial privacy and regulations.
The article describes this platform as “a new smart contract-based privacy enhancing protocol designed to increase transaction privacy on blockchains.”
The article also stated that this protocol is intended to use zero-knowledge proof to determine whether user funds come from legitimate sources and verify them without revealing the entire transaction history.
“The main idea of the platform is to allow users to publish zero-knowledge proof that their funds come from known sources, but make all transaction graphs public.
We think financial privacy and regulation can coexist. At this point, Tornado Cash is a useful privacy tool, but it is open to misuse by illegal actors. Therefore, a new platform is needed.”