Here’s a version of a thread on the Tornado Cash trial that I posted on X earlier today…
(When threads on Nostr??)
Dr. Matthew Edman is the first witness on the stand today.
He’s a co-founder and partner at the blockchain cybersecurity firm Naxo, and he’s a cryptography expert.
Thus far, in his direct testimony, guided by the defense’s Ms. Axel, he’s distilled how Ethereum works and defined terms such as “non-custodial” and “immutable”.
He’s also explained how smart contracts worked and described how and why the Tornado Cash smart contracts were immutable.
He’s made it clear to the jury that, as of May 18, 2020, Roman Storm had no ability to alter TC smart contracts nor access user funds with those smart contracts.
He also highlighted that the TC pools still exist and that the pools themselves don’t charge any fees.
He explained to the jury what TC relayers are and what the purpose of the TC DAO was.
He commented on a slide that was made and presented by IRS Special Agent George that detailed the TORN tokens that SA George said each of the TC founders held as of Dec. 18, 2020, noting that the founders didn’t have access to these tokens at the time (which was when, I believe, SA George said Storm had sent these tokens to Binance to sell them - please don’t quote me on this yet, though; I need more info).
Dr. Edman also explained that the DAO can’t modify TC pools, only the ancillary smart contracts through the governance process.
He also explained how GitHub works and the difference between UI and CLI.
Dr. Edman described how the code for the TC UI could be downloaded and run by different parties, not just the TC devs.
He also detailed the nature of IPFS, which the TC UI ran on, and which he described as a “decentralized database.”
He also discussed how Storm implemented Geoblocking for the TC UI as well as the Chainalysis oracle, which blocked sanctioned addresses from using the TC UI.
Dr. Edman has also challenged the findings of Mr. Werlau and SA DeCapua.
He was particularly harsh in his critique of Mr. Werlau’s gas ratio analysis.
IMO, Dr. Edman has been a particularly strong witness, but, unfortunately, the jury looked a bit bored and maybe even overwhelmed as he walked the court through a lot of technical jargon and how it applies to the case.
Hopefully, the jury grasped enough of what he had to say, as it presented a version of events that shows that Storm and the TC devs didn’t have as much control over the TC front end (and definitely not of the pools) as the prosecution claimed.
During the prosecution’s cross-examination of Mr. Edman, Mr. Edman agreed that most TC deposits went through the TC router between Dec. 2020 and Aug. 2022.
The prosecution also brought up how the full source code for TC wasn’t made available via GitHub until July 2022.
Dr. Edman contextualized by stating that a minified version of the code was available via GitHub starting in Sept. 2020.
The prosecution also highlighted that fewer than 50 addresses with TORN tokens voted in some of the DAO votes and that the TC founders could have had a large degree of influence over votes because of how many tokens they had (post Dec. 2021, when they got access to their tokens).
The prosecution made an effort to get Dr. Edman to share that the source code for geoblocking via the TC UI was never implemented, but Dr. Edman didn’t confirm this.
During the last ten minutes of the trial day, a second witness, Tyler Alameida, cybersecurity expert at Coinbase, took the stand to briefly share how he used TC to maintain his privacy when he made an ETH donation to the Ukrainian war fund.