Current laws in the United States do not explicitly protect open source software developers and create the risk of retroactive prosecution.
Roman Storm, a developer of the Tornado Cash privacy-preserving protocol, asked the open source software community whether they are concerned with being retroactively prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Storm asked DeFi developers: “How can you be so sure you won’t be charged by the DOJ as a money service business for building a non-custodial protocol?”
The DOJ could prosecute a case, arguing that any decentralized, non-custodial service should have been developed as a custodial service, as it did in the case against him, Storm added, citing his recent motion for acquittal, which was filed on September 30.
