DOJ Is Retrying Tornado Cash’s Co-Founder on Charges That Could Carry 40 Years

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed for a retrial of Roman Storm on the two most serious counts from his original case, proposing an October 2026 start date while the policy ground beneath the prosecution has visibly shifted.

What the Retrial Covers

A Manhattan jury reached a mixed verdict in August 2025. Storm was convicted on one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, carrying a maximum five-year sentence. On the two more serious charges, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions, the jury deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial on those counts.

Prosecutors led by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton are now seeking to retry Storm specifically on those two unresolved counts, proposing either October 5 or October 12 as start dates for a proceeding expected to last approximately three weeks. Each count carries a statutory maximum of 20 years. A conviction on both would expose Storm to a combined 40-year sentence on top of the existing conviction.

Storm’s defense has simultaneously filed a Rule 29 motion arguing insufficient evidence on the initial conviction, with oral arguments scheduled for April 9. The defense is challenging what was already decided while the government prepares to retry what was not.

The Policy Contradiction the Timing Creates

The retrial request arrived days after the U.S. Treasury submitted a 32-page report to Congress explicitly acknowledging that cryptocurrency mixing services serve legitimate privacy purposes for lawful users. That report, covered in this publication last week, stopped short of recommending new restrictions on non-custodial mixers and declined to finalize the 2023 recordkeeping proposals that would have made decentralized protocols legally unworkable.

The left hand of the federal government is acknowledging mixer legitimacy. The right hand is prosecuting a mixer developer on charges that carry 40 years. Both positions exist simultaneously within the same administration.

Industry reaction has been pointed. Representatives from the Solana Policy Institute and DeFi Education Fund described the retrial push as depressing and disappointing, particularly given that a jury of twelve people already failed to agree that Storm’s conduct on the two serious counts constituted criminal behavior beyond a reasonable doubt. A hung jury is not an acquittal, but it is not nothing. It means the government’s case did not meet the unanimity standard that criminal conviction requires.

What the Case Has Always Been About

Tornado Cash is a non-custodial mixing protocol. Storm did not hold user funds. He did not execute transactions on users’ behalf. He wrote and deployed code that allowed users to obscure the origin of their transactions on a public blockchain. The legal question at the center of his prosecution is whether a developer who builds a tool bears criminal liability for how others use that tool, particularly when the tool itself has no ability to discriminate between lawful and unlawful users.

The first jury convicted him on the lesser charge and deadlocked on the larger ones. That split suggests at least some jurors found the legal theory on money laundering and sanctions violations unpersuasive when applied to a protocol rather than an operator.

The Treasury report published last week, acknowledging legitimate mixer use cases, does not change Storm’s legal exposure. It changes the context in which a second jury will evaluate the same facts in October.

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