The year 2025 has been a year of smashing through milestones for crypto, as governments and financial organisations around the world have acknowledged and often embraced decentralised finance for what they can offer to the global economy.
Probably the epicentre of this is Crypto Week, which started on 14th July 2025 and is expected to be where a major piece of legislation allowing private companies to launch their own stablecoins is expected to be passed by the House of Representatives and passed into law.
The effect on crypto prices is exactly what you might expect, surging over the $120,000 milestone as soon as the week started, up from just under $100,000 less than a month ago.
Whilst undoubtedly huge news for cryptocurrency, particularly since more people than ever may require conversion services to pay for everyday goods using stablecoin tokens, it is also another definitive symbol of the level of integration the tokenised economy has with traditional finance.
Indeed, the same week as crypto is celebrated, a legal trial that could upend some of its very foundations has begun, with potentially gigantic implications that could not only change crypto as we know it but decentralised software development as well.
Finance And Free Speech
The case of United States v Roman Storm and Roman Semenov is about the intent surrounding the decentralised service Tornado Cash, one that evokes the legal complexities surrounding e-gold and Liberty Reserve two decades prior.
The intention of Tornado Cash and other similar mixing services was to provide a degree of privacy on blockchains where the ledger is otherwise publicly accessible using tools such as EtherScan.
By default, the blockchain is pseudonymous; payments and transfers could be linked to wallet addresses and from there the purchasing behaviour of the owner of that wallet could be pieced together through transactions to other services and transfers of crypto to other wallets, similar to a bank statement.
The idea of a tumbler or mixer was to get around this by making transactions only traceable up until they reach the tumbler, where if it is placed in a new wallet or series of wallets in different denominations it becomes more difficult to trace.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum and a vocal defender of Tornado Cash and its creators, noted its important function as a privacy aid, but much like Liberty Reserve, it was argued that the service was misused for illegal causes.
On 23rd August, two of the three developers were charged with assisting in money laundering, whilst the third, Alexey Pertsev, was sentenced to over five years in prison in the Netherlands. Tornado Cash is illegal to use for citizens in the United States.
The case itself has huge implications, not only for cryptocurrency in the future but also for programming, open-source projects and the notion of code as a form of free speech.
The End Of DeFi?
The facts of the case are generally agreed upon, but what is in question is criminal intent, and the potential chilling effect of a conviction is something that will shape crypto services going forward.
Prosecutors believe strongly enough that the company was run as a for-profit business despite the decentralised open-source nature of the code and qualified as a money transmitter, meaning that they could be criminally prosecuted for not applying know-your-customer systems.
By contrast, the main defence is that the pair simply published software code for private transactions and that it is a somewhat unprecedented reach for the US Department of Justice to claim it is a money transmission business.
Unlike e-gold and Liberty Reserve, which whilst contentious did demonstrate that the owners were in control of the service they ran and thus bore some responsibility for its misuse, there is a significant level of distance between Tornado Cash and its developers.
According to Mr Storm and some of his more public defenders, the concern is that the precedent that the case could set may not only fundamentally change how blockchain software can be published and the liability it creates, but could potentially harm open source software as well.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which focuses on digital rights issues online, characterised the Tornado Cash case as a fundamental concern for coding as a form of free speech and of the future of peer-to-peer software more broadly.
A broad interpretation of a guilty verdict could potentially make the developer of an operating system such as Windows liable for any criminal activity undertaken using it, or make encrypted messaging and voice chat services liable if someone uses it to commit a crime.
Whilst the trial itself is set to end by the middle of August 2025, the after-effects for the crypto world could last for far longer.