Roman Storm’s retrial on unresolved Tornado Cash money laundering and sanctions charges has been postponed to April 26, 2027, pushing the case back six months as a federal judge weighs his request for acquittal.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla moved the retrial on August 25 after Storm’s defense sought an April date or at least 90 days between a ruling on his Rule 29 motion and any new trial. The case had previously been scheduled for October 26.
Acquittal Motion Could Reshape the Retrial
Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business after a four-week trial in Manhattan.
Jurors failed to reach unanimous verdicts on conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions, leaving prosecutors free to retry those two counts. The money transmission offense carries a maximum five-year prison term, while each unresolved conspiracy count carries a potential maximum of 20 years. The August verdict followed four days of jury deliberations.
Storm filed his Rule 29 motion after trial, challenging the legal sufficiency of the evidence supporting both his conviction and the unresolved charges. Failla heard arguments in April but has not ruled.
The court had already approved a fall retrial schedule contingent on that decision.
DOJ Crypto Policy Has Shifted Since Storm Was Charged
Storm’s case has continued under a Justice Department that now takes a narrower position on criminal liability for noncustodial crypto software.
Todd Blanche, now U.S. attorney general, issued the April 2025 “Ending Regulation By Prosecution” memo while serving as deputy attorney general. The policy directed prosecutors not to target exchanges, mixers or offline wallets merely for conduct by their end users or unwitting regulatory violations.
Matthew Galeotti later made the department’s developer policy more explicit, stating that contributing code to an open-source project without specific intent to assist criminal conduct does not create criminal liability. The DOJ also said new money-transmission charges generally would not be approved where software is genuinely decentralized, automates peer-to-peer transactions and gives third parties no custody or control over user assets.
Prosecutors have nevertheless continued pursuing Storm, arguing that Tornado Cash’s developers maintained infrastructure and knowingly facilitated the movement of criminal proceeds.
Tornado Cash Case Returns to Developer Control
The retrial will return to the same dispute over how much control Storm retained after Tornado Cash’s smart contracts were deployed.
The first trial examined changes to Tornado Cash’s frontend and the project’s use of a Chainalysis sanctions oracle intended to block addresses on sanctions lists. Defense testimony challenged whether those controls could stop users who moved funds through fresh addresses before interacting with the protocol.
The legal environment around Tornado Cash has also changed since Storm was indicted. Treasury removed Tornado Cash sanctions in March 2025 after the Fifth Circuit ruled that immutable smart contracts did not qualify as property that OFAC could sanction.
Storm’s Rule 29 motion remains before Failla. The court has now set the retrial for April 26, 2027, with the new proceeding still contingent on how she resolves the acquittal request.
