The retrial of Roman Storm, co-founder of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, has been pushed to April 2027, according to the United States District Court Southern District of New York. The delay extends a legal ordeal that began in the summer of 2023 and has already moved through an arrest, a year of pretrial proceedings, and a full trial in federal court.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla adjourned Storm's retrial by more than six months in an order entered Tuesday in the Southern District of New York. The retrial is now scheduled for April 26, 2027, at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse. The pretrial schedule runs from expert disclosures on February 5, 2027, to a final pretrial conference on April 20.
Federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton had pushed for an earlier start. In March they asked for a retrial beginning October 5 or 12. Storm's legal team called that premature while the acquittal motion remained unresolved before the court.
Storm responded to the court order on social media.
"A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop," he wrote. "It's about setting an example."
One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself.
— Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ (@rstormsf) August 25, 2026
The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt.…
The arrest nobody saw coming
Storm was taken into custody on August 23, 2023, at his home in Washington state. He was not a public figure that morning. Outside of the Ethereum developer community, few people knew his name. The arrival of federal agents at a private home to arrest a programmer over code he had written was a situation the open-source world had not confronted at this scale.
The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, named Storm alongside co-founder Roman Semenov. It charged them with conspiracy to commit money laundering and with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. A third count alleged violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, directly tied to the U.S. Treasury's decision to sanction Tornado Cash in August 2022. Semenov was believed to be in Russia and was never arrested. Storm appeared in court alone.
He was released on bail. In the months that followed, he lived under the conditions of pretrial supervision while his legal team worked to challenge the government's charges before the case ever reached a jury. A motion to dismiss was among the tools his attorneys used. It did not succeed.
The government's case rested on a specific claim: that Tornado Cash had been used to launder more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds. Federal prosecutors named the Lazarus Group, a hacking unit linked to the North Korean government that had been connected to several major cryptocurrency thefts, as among the primary beneficiaries. The indictment characterized Storm not as a passive programmer who wrote code and stepped back, but as someone who continued to make active decisions about the protocol while aware, the government said, of how it was being used.
Storm pleaded not guilty. He has maintained that position since August 2023.
What Tornado Cash was built to do
Tornado Cash was a non-custodial protocol deployed on Ethereum. The mechanics were straightforward: a user deposited a fixed amount of cryptocurrency into the smart contract, waited, and then withdrew an equivalent amount to an unconnected wallet address. The blockchain recorded both the deposit and the withdrawal, but not the link between them.
Storm and his co-founders had argued this was a legitimate privacy function. Ethereum transactions are permanently visible to anyone. A person can look up any wallet address and see its complete transaction history. Tornado Cash was designed to sever that connection, in the same way that a cash payment leaves no record tied to a bank account.
In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control placed Tornado Cash's smart contract addresses on the Specially Designated Nationals list. The action drew a legal challenge almost immediately. A group of users filed suit in the Fifth Circuit, arguing that immutable smart contracts are not "property" under the statutes OFAC had relied on, and therefore fell outside the agency's authority to sanction.
In November 2024, the Fifth Circuit sided with the plaintiffs in Van Loon v. Department of Treasury. The court held that the immutable contracts could not be sanctioned under OFAC's existing authority. The ruling did not dissolve Storm's criminal charges, but it removed a foundational element from the government's broader enforcement framework around Tornado Cash.
A Dutch conviction and a New York trial
Before Storm's case went to a jury in New York, a verdict had already arrived from Europe. Alexey Pertsev, a developer tied to Tornado Cash, was convicted in a Netherlands court in May 2024 and sentenced to five years and four months in prison on money laundering charges. Dutch prosecutors had applied a theory of developer liability similar to what U.S. prosecutors brought against Storm: that building and maintaining a platform used for money laundering makes the developer criminally responsible for that laundering.
The Pertsev conviction came months before Storm's own trial began in New York. It showed that at least one court outside the United States had been willing to accept the developer liability theory and translate it into a sentence.
Storm's trial opened in the fall of 2024 before Judge Katherine Polk Failla in the Southern District of New York. In the months before trial, Storm's attorneys filed motions to have the case dismissed. Judge Failla denied those motions. The trial proceeded on all counts.
The government's evidence at trial pointed to Storm's direct role in maintaining Tornado Cash's front-end interface. Prosecutors introduced communications they said showed his awareness that sanctioned entities had used the protocol. The core of their argument was not simply that criminals used his software. They said Storm knew this was happening and continued to make decisions about the protocol regardless.
Storm's defense team maintained that he was a software developer whose neutral tool was misused by others, and that the criminal theory applied to him would expose open-source developers to prosecution whenever their software was later put to criminal use by third parties.
The Electric Coin Company was among the organizations within the crypto industry that publicly described the prosecution as a threat to open-source development. Supporters organized fundraising for Storm's legal defense throughout the proceedings.
Gunel Ismayilova
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