Key Takeaways:
Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm will not face a second jury until April 26, 2027, after a U.S. judge granted his request to push the retrial back roughly six months while his bid to overturn a 2025 conviction remains unresolved.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued the scheduling order on Aug. 25, moving the retrial from the October 2026 timetable prosecutors had sought. Storm's defense cited scheduling conflicts and the pending Rule 29 motion for judgment of acquittal, filed Sept. 30, 2025, which argues the government's evidence was insufficient to sustain his conviction for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.
Failla heard oral arguments on that motion on April 9 but had not ruled when she reset the calendar. Under the revised schedule, expert disclosures are due in early 2027 and the final pretrial conference is set for April 20, six days before the retrial begins. The two charges awaiting a second jury — conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions — each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.
The delay extends legal uncertainty for privacy-focused protocols and their developers, a question the case has put at the center of U.S. crypto enforcement. A conviction on either unresolved count would establish that developers of privacy software can face decades in prison for how third parties use their code, a precedent that could reshape how open-source projects are built and funded.
Storm went to trial in the Southern District of New York in the summer of 2025 on three criminal charges tied to Tornado Cash, the Ethereum-based protocol he co-founded that lets users break the on-chain link between sending and receiving wallets. After four days of deliberations, jurors on Aug. 6, 2025 convicted him on the money transmitting count — which carries a maximum of five years — but deadlocked on the money laundering and sanctions conspiracies, prompting Failla to declare a mistrial on those two counts.
Prosecutors opted to retry Storm on the unresolved charges. The government's case, which also names co-founder Roman Semenov, alleges the pair helped operate a service that processed more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds, including funds tied to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Storm's lawyers argue the protocol ran through immutable smart contracts that his team did not control, and that users interacted with the code without developer approval.
The Justice Department had already narrowed part of its case before trial. In May 2025, prosecutors dropped the portion of the money transmission allegation based on failure to register as a money transmitter under 18 U.S.C. § 1960(b)(1)(B), citing an April 2025 department policy memo discouraging criminal cases built on technical registration violations.
Tornado Cash's regulatory history has shifted independently of Storm's prosecution. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the protocol in August 2022, alleging it laundered billions in virtual currency. In November 2024, the Fifth Circuit ruled that immutable Tornado Cash smart contracts could not be treated as property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and Treasury removed the sanctions on March 21, 2025.
That decision did not end the criminal case. If Failla grants the Rule 29 motion, Storm's existing conviction could be set aside; if she denies it, the conviction stands while prosecutors pursue the two deadlocked counts. Storm, who remains free on bond, has said a conviction on both unresolved charges could expose him to as much as 40 years in federal prison.
Support has come from parts of the Ethereum community. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in January 2026 called for sentencing leniency, arguing privacy software can serve lawful purposes and that open-source development alone should not establish criminal liability. Storm's defense has raised more than $6.3 million, with the Ethereum Foundation pledging up to $1 million in matching support.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
