NEW YORK — Hack and scam victims who reached out to Tornado Cash requesting assistance retrieving their stolen funds received little in the way of help from the privacy tool’s developers, three government witnesses told the jury during day two of Roman Storm’s criminal money laundering trial.

One victim, a Taiwan-born Georgia woman who said she lost nearly $250,000 to a wrong-number pig butchering scam — with a portion of the proceeds laundered through Tornado Cash — said her request for help went unanswered. Another witness, a lawyer for crypto exchange BitMart, which was hacked for nearly $200 million in 2021, said that Storm told his team that there was nothing he or his fellow developers could do to retrieve the funds given the decentralized nature of the protocol.

A third witness, Andy Ho — CTO and co-founder at Sky Mavis, the blockchain gaming company behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network — detailed how hackers stole over $625 million in an exploit of Ronin Bridge in 2022, in effect fully looting the protocol’s coffers. Though Ho himself didn’t mention it during his testimony, the group behind the exploit was later revealed to be the Lazarus Group, North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking organization, which used Tornado Cash to launder a portion of the stolen funds.

During their examination of the three witnesses, prosecutors attempted to paint a portrait of Storm as someone who refused to lift a finger to help hack victims, or to make changes to the Tornado Cash protocol to dissuade future use of the protocol by criminals.

Storm’s lawyers, when they had the chance to cross-examine the «victim» witnesses, cast their client’s lack of action in another light: he was, they insinuated, unable to help retrieve funds, because Tornado Cash was decentralized. Storm told BitMart’s lawyer — New York-based Joseph Evans, a partner at law firm McDermott, Will and Emery — so himself in an email on Dec. 15, 2021, according to an exhibit introduced by the government.

Evans also admitted on cross-examination that Tornado Cash wasn’t the only place BitMart’s hacked funds went after the exploit: his firm also reached out to 1inch, a decentralized exchange aggregator, which told them to come back with a warrant, as well as Cloudflare — a major website infrastructure provider — and Binance. Evans said he received no response from the latter two companies.

Brian Klein, a partner at Waymaker LLP and a lawyer for Roman Storm, asked Evans if it was true that the only person who had ever directly responded to Evans’ inquiries in the wake of BitMart’s hack was Roman Storm.

“That’s correct,” Evans said.

Storm’s lawyers asked Ho, the CTO of Sky Mavis, a similar line of questions when he was on the stand, though Ho — who said he had been subpoenaed by the government and asked to travel to New York from his hometown of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to testify — was less forthcoming.

Keri Axel, another Waymaker partner and member of Storm’s defense team, asked Ho if he remembered the findings presented to Sky Mavis by Crowdstrike after the exploit, including that the stolen funds had filtered through a number of protocols and exchanges besides Tornado Cash, including FTX, Huobi, and Crypto.com.

“I don’t recall,” Ho said to each.

Axel asked how much, if any, of the stolen money was able to ultimately be recovered. Ho said that $6 million was returned by Norwegian police.

“Did you understand that that $6 million had gone through Tornado Cash?” Axel asked Ho.

“I don’t have that knowledge,» Ho said.

Read more: Legitimate Privacy Tool or Dirty Money Laundromat? Lawyers Debate Role of Tornado Cash on Day 1 of Roman Storm Trial

Donald Trump is unhappy with the head of the U.S. central bank.

Here’s why: Powell, who hurriedly cut federal interest rates by 75 basis points ahead of the 2024 election, has been reluctant to ease monetary conditions further, citing potentially inflationary effects of the White House’s new tariff policies.

Trump has been floating the idea of firing him for a while now. The regulator, for his part, has maintained since November that Trump lacks the legal authority to do so. Powell’s term is slated to end in May 2026 in any case.

«Jerome Powell has been very bad for our country,» Trump said over the weekend. «We should have the lowest interest rate on Earth, and we don’t. He just refuses to do it.»

The coalition against Powell appears to be growing by the day. The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Bill Pulte, has accused the chairman of political bias and called for a congressional investigation into his leadership.

Republican members of Congress (such Senators Rick Scott and Tommy Tuberville, and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan) have, too, criticized Powell’s actions over the past few months.

Then there’s Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve governor — and potential Powell replacement — who says that it’s time for “regime change” at the Fed. (I’m only naming a few people, but the list is long.)

Now, the Federal Reserve is technically independent, so Powell is protected from arbitrary dismissal and can only be removed “for cause,” meaning there needs to be a serious, legally justified reason to fire him.

Powell’s critics are now using the Federal Reserve’s $2.5 billion headquarters renovation as a new angle of attack, alleging potential misconduct or that Powell misled Congress in his testimony regarding the renovation. (The project was set in motion years before Trump appointed Powell in 2018.)

The pressure has increased even more in the last couple of days. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that a “formal process” to replace Powell was underway. A few hours later, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna tweeted that Powell’s firing was “imminent,” sending Polymarket odds of the event to 27%.

The rumors did not abate on Wednesday. Bloomberg and CBS reported today that Trump was looking to pull the trigger soon, while The New York Times claimed that the president had already drafted a letter to the effect.

Trump, however, immediately said he wasn’t planning on firing the Fed chairman, and even downplayed accusations of fraud about the $2.5 billion headquarters renovation.

Where does that leave us? Let’s keep our eyes on the prize: CME FedWatch indicates there’s only a 2.6% chance of rates coming down at the next Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, scheduled for July 30. However, those odds jump to almost 60% for September.

The governance token of World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his family, may soon become tradable on exchanges after a community vote concluded on Wednesday.

Token holders voted 99% in favor for the proposal to allow WLFI tokens to trade on secondary markets and transfer peer-to-peer, a Snapshot vote shows.

The decision comes after the protocol raised around $590 million last year in a pre-sale where investors could buy WLFI tokens. For example, Tron founder Justin Sun also purchased $30 million of the asset. World Liberty Financial is developing a DeFi lending and borrowing platform, and also issues a U.S. dollar stablecoin named USD1.

The WLFI token was designed to give holders the right to participate in the protocol’s governance and decision-making. However, those tokens that were sold to early supporters have been locked-up since then, without the ability to sell, buy or transfer them.

The proposal that passed sets a phased token unlock plan. Some tokens that were sold during the presale will unlock at trading launch, while the rest await a second community vote to decide their release schedule. Tokens held by founders, the team and advisors will remain locked longer than early supporter allocations to underscore long-term commitment to the project, the proposal said.

Final unlock timing and eligibility criteria will be determined later, it added.

Read more: World Liberty Makes Narrative U-Turn, Says WLFI Token Will Become Tradable Soon