Federal prosecutors are seeking to retry Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on serious money laundering and sanctions charges after a Manhattan jury deadlocked on those counts last August. The Justice Department proposed an October retrial for conspiracy counts carrying a potential 40-year sentence. Storm’s legal team must first resolve a pending motion for acquittal before any new trial date is set.
Federal prosecutors have requested a Manhattan judge retry Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on money-laundering and sanctions-evasion charges a jury deadlocked on last August. In a letter filed Monday, prosecutors asked for a retrial date in early October on two conspiracy counts carrying a combined maximum sentence of up to 40 years. The jury previously convicted Storm of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business but could not reach a verdict on the more severe charges.
The U.S. Treasury had blacklisted Tornado Cash in 2022, alleging $7 billion was laundered through the protocol, though sanctions were later lifted after a court questioned the authority to sanction open-source smart contracts. “If I can’t fund a defense, they win by default. If you care about financial privacy, if you write code and believe that code is speech—this is the moment,” Storm wrote on social media following the retrial request. This legal move occurs amid mixed policy signals from Washington regarding crypto privacy tools.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury sent a report to Congress acknowledging that lawful users may leverage mixers for financial privacy. “This moment really exposes how incoherent U.S. crypto policy is right now,” cybercrime consultant David Sehyeon Baek stated. “On one side, you have Treasury finally acknowledging out loud that mixers and privacy tools can be perfectly lawful,” he added, noting the Department of Justice is simultaneously pursuing an aggressive criminal theory against a developer.
Before a retrial proceeds, the court must rule on Storm’s pending motion for acquittal, scheduled for argument on April 9. The bipartisan Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, reintroduced in January, seeks to explicitly bar non-custodial developers from being classified as money transmitters under federal law. A retrial would proceed only if the court denies Storm’s motion for acquittal on the deadlocked charges.
