The Defi Education Fund, a research and interest organization, has requested the Trump administration to intervene in the persecution of Roman Storm, the co-founder of the Tornado Cash that is confronted with criminal persecution.
According to a April 28 letter Focused on Crypto Czar David Sacks from the White House, the group urged President Trump to “take immediate action to stop the lawless campaign of the Biden era of Justice to criminalize open-source software development.”
They argued that the Storm case is part of a broader over -range that “threatens the basis of technological innovation” in the United States.
Storm, which the US Department of Justice sued in August 2023, has been accused of helping to wash more than $ 1 billion by Tornado Cash, a popular crypto mixture.
He is confronted with accusations of conspiracy to facilitate money laundering, conspiracy to exploit a shipment without a permit and breaking American sanctions, violations that can bear a combined punishment for up to 45 years if they are convicted.
As previously reported by Crypto.news, Storm submitted a motion last year to reject all charges, with the argument that Tornado Cash was an unchangeable, open-source protocol outside of his control.
The American district judge Katherine Polk Faila, however, denied the motion in September 2024 and ruled that the indictment met the legal threshold to continue. A subsequent bid for reconsideration was also rejected in February 2025.
In their letter, the Defi Education Fund argued that the Ministry of Justice pushes an “unprecedented theory” by trying to hold developers liable for how others use their code, even when they “have no control over those third parties or user assets”.
They warned that if this legal approach was not checked, the open-source development completely ‘freezes’.
The group also pointed out that the prosecution of Storm seems to be contradictory in contradiction with previous guidance from Treasury Department that was issued during the first term of Trump, which made it clear that developers of self -wide protocols are not considered money channels under federal legislation.
“We in the blockchain industry have been familiar with that guidance in good faith since 2019,” said the letter.
Furthermore, the letter warned that after the individual case of Storm, the actions of the DOJ create a legal environment that enables “politically motivated enforcement” and endangers every open source developer, regardless of industry.
“Nobody who writes Code in good faith should fear prosecution for the actions of strangers,” said the letter, with the argument that innovation in areas such as financial technology, artificial intelligence and even health care can be held liable for how their tools are used.
Achieving the goal of turning America into the ‘Crypto capital of the planet’ requires them to protect the builders who create the underlying technology.
“We ask President Trump to protect American software developers, to restore the legal clarity and to end this illegal Doj overrun,” the group wrote that the deployment “could not be higher” for the future of crypto -innovation in the US
In the meantime, support for the petition is growing, with more than 253 signatures from the press of various market leaders, including Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko, co-founder of the Matt Huang paradigm and bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams.
