A U.S. federal judge has pushed Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm’s retrial to April 26, 2027, about six months later than planned, while his motion seeking to overturn his existing conviction remains unresolved.
- Roman Storm’s retrial has been moved from October 2026 to April 26, 2027.
- His pending acquittal motion challenges his 2025 money transmitting conviction.
- Storm still faces money laundering and sanctions charges carrying up to 20 years each.
- The first jury deadlocked on both charges after convicting Storm on one separate count.
The Aug. 25 court order states that U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted Storm’s request to postpone the proceedings, moving the retrial from an October 2026 timetable after his defense cited scheduling conflicts and the pending motion for judgment of acquittal.
Storm filed the Rule 29 motion on Sept. 30, 2025, challenging his conviction for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business on the grounds that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence to sustain the verdict. Failla heard oral arguments on April 9, 2026, but had not ruled on the request when she issued the latest scheduling order.
Under the revised calendar, Storm will face another jury on two charges left unresolved during his first trial: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. Each carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
Roman Storm retrial has been moved to April 2027
Storm’s defense asked Failla earlier in August to schedule the retrial no sooner than April 2027, according to the court proceedings, while prosecutors opposed extending the case and preferred the earlier October timetable.
The judge ultimately adopted the defense’s requested date of April 26, 2027, and reset the other pretrial deadlines around it. Expert disclosures will now take place in early 2027, with a final pretrial conference scheduled for April 20, six days before the trial is due to begin.
The new schedule reverses the timetable prosecutors had sought several months earlier. In March, crypto.news reported on prosecutors seeking an October retrial after the first jury failed to return unanimous verdicts on the money laundering and sanctions charges.
At the time, Storm said another trial would expose him to as much as 40 years in federal prison if he were convicted on both unresolved counts. He also said his legal resources had been heavily depleted during the first four-week trial.
The pending Rule 29 motion could affect another part of the case before Storm returns to court. Under the federal rule, a judge may enter a judgment of acquittal when the evidence introduced at trial is legally insufficient to support a conviction.
If Failla grants Storm’s motion, his conviction on the unlicensed money transmitting charge could be set aside. If the motion is denied, the conviction would remain in place while prosecutors proceed with their second attempt to secure verdicts on the two charges on which the original jury deadlocked.
The first jury convicted Storm on only one count
Storm went to trial in Manhattan in the summer of 2025 on three criminal charges stemming from his involvement with Tornado Cash, the Ethereum-based privacy protocol he co-founded.
After several weeks of testimony and four days of deliberations, jurors returned a split verdict on Aug. 6, 2025. They found Storm guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business but could not unanimously decide the money laundering and sanctions conspiracy counts.
Failla declared a mistrial on the two unresolved counts, leaving prosecutors with the option to try Storm again before another jury.
The charge on which Storm was convicted carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The two counts awaiting retrial carry substantially higher penalties, with up to 20 years available on each if a conviction is secured.
Before the first trial began, the Justice Department had already reduced part of its case. In May 2025, prosecutors narrowed the money transmission allegation by dropping the portion based on Storm’s alleged failure to comply with federal money transmitter registration requirements under 18 U.S.C. § 1960(b)(1)(B).
Prosecutors continued with the remaining money transmission theory and the money laundering and sanctions allegations, saying their decision was consistent with an April 2025 Justice Department policy memorandum that instructed federal prosecutors to avoid using criminal cases to regulate the crypto industry through technical registration violations.
Storm was originally charged in August 2023 alongside Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov. U.S. prosecutors accused the pair of helping operate a service that processed more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds, including funds connected to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
The government’s case has focused partly on whether Storm and his co-founders continued developing, promoting and financially benefiting from Tornado Cash despite knowing that criminals and sanctioned actors were using the protocol.
Storm’s lawyers have disputed that interpretation, arguing that Tornado Cash operated through decentralized smart contracts and that its developers did not control individual transactions or take custody of funds moving through the protocol.
Tornado Cash sanctions were removed before the trial
Tornado Cash allows users to deposit cryptocurrency into smart contracts and later withdraw funds to a separate address, reducing the direct on-chain connection between the sending and receiving wallets.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the protocol in August 2022, accusing it of being used to launder billions of dollars in virtual currency, including funds stolen by the Lazarus Group.
Legal challenges to those sanctions later produced an outcome separate from Storm’s criminal prosecution. In November 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that immutable Tornado Cash smart contracts could not be treated as property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act because they could not be owned or controlled.
Treasury subsequently removed Tornado Cash sanctions on March 21, 2025, reversing the designation imposed in 2022. The department continued to warn about North Korea’s use of digital assets for cybercrime and illicit financing after withdrawing the designation.
The sanctions decision did not terminate the criminal proceedings against Storm. Prosecutors continued arguing that his conduct before and during the period covered by the indictment could support the separate conspiracy charges.
An additional sanctions lawsuit brought by Coin Center was later closed after the government stopped defending the Tornado Cash designation following its removal.
Developer control remains disputed in Storm’s case
Questions over how much control a software developer must exercise over a decentralized protocol before facing criminal liability have remained central to Storm’s defense.
Prosecutors have argued that Storm’s role went past publishing open-source software, alleging that Tornado Cash’s founders maintained parts of the project, promoted its use and profited from it while knowing illicit funds were passing through the protocol.
The defense has countered that Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts could continue operating without Storm and that users could interact with the contracts without the developers approving individual transfers.
Support for Storm has also come from parts of the Ethereum community. In January 2026, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called for sentencing leniency and argued that privacy software can serve lawful purposes while open-source development should not by itself establish criminal liability. The report said Storm’s legal defense had raised more than $6.3 million with support from Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation and other donors.
The Ethereum Foundation had previously pledged up to $1 million in matching support for Storm’s legal defense following the 2025 verdict, while Storm remained free on bond as the criminal proceedings continued.
Failla has not issued a decision on Storm’s Sept. 30, 2025 Rule 29 motion. Under the new court schedule, the final pretrial conference on the unresolved money laundering and sanctions charges is set for April 20, 2027, with the retrial scheduled to start on April 26.
