The Justice Department said Tornado Cash was a money transmission business, among other details. The U.S. Justice Department has rejected a motion by Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm to dismiss criminal charges against it. Friday's filing said Tornado Cash was a money transmission business, and the Justice Department said it expected its evidence to support those allegations.

In a filing on Friday, the U.S. Justice Department rejected Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm's motion to dismiss criminal charges, saying defense documents presented disputed facts that should be weighed by a jury rather than arguments appropriate to an early-stage motion. The Justice Department charged Storm with conspiring with fellow developer Roman Semenov to launder money, conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmission business, and conspiring to violate sanctions laws by creating and operating Tornado Cash, a crypto hybrid service designed to anonymize transactions. According to U.S. authorities, North Korea's Lazarus Group and other criminal entities laundered money through Tornado Cash.

      Storm's defense attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the complaint in late March, arguing that Tornado Cash is not a custodial hybrid service and does not meet the definition of a "financial institution," and that Storm has no control over the service or prevents organizations like Lazarus from using it. The defense argued that simply developing a project's code is not the same as running a money-laundering entity.

In Friday's filing, the Justice Department disputed the defense's characterization of Tornado Cash, saying it was announced as a mixer in 2019 and that the entire service includes a website, user interface, a set of smart contracts and a network of "Repeaters." "Defendants cannot seek dismissal of the indictment simply by presenting their own disputed view of how the Tornado Cash service operates and based on their own self-serving version of their intent or lack of intent with respect to certain acts," Friday's filing said.

The DOJ also disputed Storm's claims about how the Tornado Cash interface works and how much control individual users may have over the deposit and withdrawal process, and provided screenshots. The filing also argues that Storm and its co-founders controlled the mixer for at least the period of time the Justice Department referred to in its filing, from 2019 to August 2022.

The filing repeatedly referred to evidence the Justice Department expected to introduce at trial, dealing with details about how Storm and other Tornado Cash founders built and developed systems, how people used Tornado Cash and more. Storm is expected to go on trial this September, while Semenov remains at large.