Tornado Cash & Samourai Wallet — privacy-tool prosecutions and the code-is-speech axis

Web-verified 2026-06-08. Structured + edges + sources: spec-tornado-samourai.json. Evidence-graded. Three strands are held separate — this is the privacy-vs-surveillance axis (the repo's anti-digital-ID spine), not an endorsement of laundering. Defendants are described exactly as the record states (convictions, pleas, deadlocks, appeals).

Hold three true things at once

A — The criminal use was real (STRONG). Tornado Cash laundered >$7.6B since 2019. DPRK's Lazarus Group ran >$455M (Ronin/Axie, Mar 2022), >$96M (Harmony, Jun 2022), ≥$7.8M (Nomad, Aug 2022) through it. The Dutch court tied ~$2.2B to Pertsev's operation. The harm is genuine — that's the point the other two strands must coexist with.

B — The legal theories were rejected or contradicted (STRONG). OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash (Aug 8 2022) — the first immutable smart-contract protocol ever sanctioned. In Van Loon v. Treasury (5th Cir., Nov 26 2024) a unanimous panel held the immutable contracts are not "property" under IEEPA ("just software code," no owner) — OFAC "overstepped." Treasury delisted Tornado Cash Mar 21 2025. And in Samourai, FinCEN had told prosecutors (Aug 2023) the wallet was not a money transmitter and needed no license — six months before they charged it.

C — Developers were prosecuted anyway, with conduct problems (facts STRONG; bad-faith CONTESTED).

• Samourai — Rodriguez (CEO) & Hill (CTO) charged Apr 2024. Prosecutors withheld the FinCEN communication until Apr 1 2025 (defense: a Brady violation). On Apr 7 2025 DAG Todd Blanche's "Ending Regulation by Prosecution" memo told DOJ to stop targeting non-custodial wallets/mixers. SDNY proceeded anyway: Rodriguez & Hill pled guilty to Count II (unlicensed money transmitting) Jul 29–30 2025; the money-laundering count was dismissed. Rodriguez 5 years, Hill 4 years.
• Tornado Cash / Roman Storm — SDNY, mixed verdict Aug 6 2025: guilty of conspiracy to run an unlicensed money-transmitting business; jury deadlocked on money-laundering and sanctions conspiracies. DOJ moved (Mar 9 2026) to retry the deadlocked counts (~Oct 2026).
• International — Alexey Pertsev convicted in the Netherlands (May 14 2024), 64 months; released to monitoring Feb 2025, detained again pending appeal. Co-founder Roman Semenov OFAC-designated + charged, at large. Developer liability is being litigated across jurisdictions.

Why it belongs in this corpus

This is the cleanest privacy-vs-surveillance case study here: the same state apparatus that pushes digital-ID / age-verification surveillance (digitalid-*, age-verification-abolition) simultaneously criminalizes financial-privacy tooling — on theories courts and agencies partly rejected — while real Lazarus laundering supplies the justification. It plugs straight into the SDNY / "regulation by prosecution" thread (spec-sec-sdny-regulatory) and the DPRK/Lazarus thread (Tasks #5/#7). Overlay only — never used in the formal proofs.

← Research index · structured data: spec-tornado-samourai.json · spec-tornado-samourai.md