Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm will not face a second jury until April 2027 after a federal judge pushed back his retrial while a potentially decisive motion for acquittal remains unresolved.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla on Tuesday, Aug. 25, moved the retrial to April 26, 2027, from Oct. 26, 2026. The case will return to the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan, nearly 21 months after Storm’s first trial ended with a split result.
The delay follows an Aug. 3 request from Storm’s lawyers, who asked for an April 2027 trial date or at least 90 days between a ruling on his pending motion for judgment of acquittal and any retrial. Failla had previously scheduled the second trial for Oct. 26, contingent on resolving that motion. Prosecutors had favored an October 2026 retrial.
Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business after a four-week trial. The jury could not reach unanimous verdicts on two more serious counts: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions laws. Prosecutors subsequently decided to retry him on both unresolved charges.
Each of those counts carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years, although any eventual sentence would depend on the court and applicable sentencing rules rather than automatically reaching the combined maximum.
The original prosecution accused Storm and fellow Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov of operating and promoting a crypto mixer that authorities said handled more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds. Prosecutors alleged that hundreds of millions of dollars connected to North Korea’s Lazarus Group passed through Tornado Cash and argued that its founders continued operating components of the service despite knowing about its use by hackers and other criminals.
Storm has disputed the government’s theory that he should be criminally responsible for how third parties used software he helped develop.
His defense filed a Rule 29 motion for judgment of acquittal after the first trial, arguing that the evidence was insufficient to support criminal liability. Failla heard oral argument on April 9, 2026, but had not ruled on the motion by the time she postponed the retrial this week.
The motion is particularly important because it is not merely another pretrial dispute. A judgment of acquittal could eliminate some or all of the criminal counts before another jury is selected, while a denial would leave Storm preparing to defend himself again against the two charges on which the first jury deadlocked.
Storm’s lawyers have also tried to capitalize on a March Supreme Court decision involving internet provider Cox Communications. The Supreme Court held that Cox was not contributorily liable for copyright infringement committed by customers because the company neither induced the infringement nor offered a service designed for that purpose. Storm’s defense has argued that the reasoning supports its contention that providing technology that others misuse does not by itself establish the required criminal intent. Prosecutors have argued that the comparison does not fit Storm’s conduct.
The broader legal environment around Tornado Cash has also changed considerably since Storm was indicted in 2023.
A federal appeals court ruled in November 2024 that Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts were not property that could be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, finding that the Treasury Department had exceeded its statutory authority. The Treasury formally removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list in March 2025, while continuing to warn about North Korean use of digital assets for money laundering.
That decision did not itself erase Storm’s criminal case, which involves allegations about his own conduct and knowledge rather than simply whether Tornado Cash’s smart contracts could be sanctioned.
Chainalysis Becomes Part of Storm’s Defense Narrative
Storm has also drawn renewed attention to Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics company whose technology has been widely used by law enforcement to trace cryptocurrency transactions.
In a social media statement following the postponement, Storm pointed to court proceedings concerning a Tornado Cash relayer that Chainalysis operated in 2022. Relayers submit withdrawals on behalf of Tornado Cash users and receive fees, allowing users to withdraw without directly linking the recipient address to the gas-paying address.
Court proceedings cited by Storm showed that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees. His lawyers had sought testimony and records concerning the operation, arguing that the company’s involvement complicated the government’s portrayal of Tornado Cash infrastructure. There is no indication that Storm knew at the time that Chainalysis was operating the relayer, and the existence of the relayer does not itself establish unlawful conduct by the company.
The issue nevertheless gives Storm a politically potent argument: a blockchain analytics company assisting law enforcement could interact with Tornado Cash infrastructure while a developer faces criminal prosecution over his own role in building and operating parts of the system.
Analysis: The Delay Deepens the Fight Over Where Software Ends and Liability Begins
For Storm, six additional months are valuable. But the bigger advantage is not simply more preparation time. It is that the court now has more room to decide the question that could determine whether another trial is necessary at all.
The first jury’s split verdict already exposed the weakness in treating the case as a straightforward prosecution of a crypto mixer. Jurors were willing to convict Storm on the money-transmission count but could not agree that prosecutors had proved the more demanding money laundering and sanctions conspiracies beyond a reasonable doubt.
That distinction goes to the heart of the case.
Prosecutors are not arguing merely that Tornado Cash existed and criminals used it. They must connect Storm’s own knowledge, intent and conduct to the crimes alleged. The defense, meanwhile, wants the dispute framed around something much broader: whether someone who develops neutral privacy infrastructure becomes responsible when criminals later use it.
The Supreme Court’s Cox ruling makes that debate harder to dismiss. Copyright law and criminal money laundering law are different, so Cox does not mechanically decide Storm’s case. But its underlying logic is uncomfortable for the prosecution if liability begins to look too dependent on simply knowing that bad actors use a general-purpose service.
There is another tension now hanging over the case. In April 2025, the Justice Department issued its “Ending Regulation By Prosecution” policy, saying it would no longer target mixing services or software providers merely for the actions of end users or unwitting regulatory violations. DOJ later said new cases should generally not target truly decentralized, non-custodial software that merely automates peer-to-peer transactions where developers lack custody and control of user funds.
Storm’s prosecution predates that policy, and prosecutors maintain that his conduct went beyond passively publishing code. Still, continuing to pursue the two most serious counts places the government in the unusual position of defending an older prosecution while publicly describing a narrower approach for future cases.
The Chainalysis issue sharpens the same question from another direction. Operating a relayer is not equivalent to founding and developing Tornado Cash, and there is no basis to assume Chainalysis committed a crime. But its participation illustrates how difficult it is to draw a clean legal boundary around infrastructure that can serve legitimate, investigative and illicit purposes at the same time.
That is why the April 2027 date matters beyond Storm himself.
If Failla grants substantial portions of the acquittal motion before then, the case could provide developers with clearer limits on how far federal money laundering and sanctions theories can reach into decentralized software. If the motion fails and prosecutors ultimately win convictions on the deadlocked counts, developers may instead have to think much more carefully about what happens after they learn that criminals are using the systems they created.
The retrial has been delayed, but the central question has only become harder to avoid: at what point does writing and supporting financial privacy software turn into legally participating in what its users do with it?