Today's proceedings in US v. Storm were largely about establishing the source of various pieces of evidence, including messages taken from electronic devices recovered from Storm's Washington home, and Telegram messages allegedly pulled from Alexey Pertsev's phone. 🧵

Walking through the raid on Storm's home with FBI special agent Jeremy Henry, prosecutors brought in a Tornado Cash light-up sign found there. They plugged it in. "May the record reflect that the sign is operable," Judge Failla deadpanned. "It's lights up."

The sign reflects much of the prosecution's case, which attempts to cast Storm and co. as ruthless and greedy, but often can be read as the opposite. The sign was small and cheap-looking. An artifact of aspiration, not opulence.

The same was true of much of the testimony of FBI agent Joel DiCapoa, a blockchain forensic tracer. The afternoon was devoted to DiCapoa tracing funds from the hacks of KuCoin, Bitmart, and others.

In one line of questioning, Gov. displayed TG messages from Semenov to Storm worrying that the Ronin hackers would use Tornado. Strangely, these messages showed Storm wasn't even aware the jack had happened.

Semenov called the Ronin and Beanstalk hackers "morons" who had "spoiled all the stats" by making criminal proceeds a larger portion of TC traffic. He certainly didn't seem excited.