Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash Retrial Pushed to April 2027

Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm will not be retried on the two counts a jury deadlocked on until the spring of 2027, after Judge Katherine Polk Failla adjourned the proceeding by more than six months.

The order, entered Tuesday in the Southern District of New York, sets the retrial for April 26, 2027 at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse and amends the pretrial schedule to run from expert disclosures on February 5, 2027 to a final conference on April 20. Failla excluded the intervening time under the Speedy Trial Act.

She cited Storm’s pending motion for acquittal and “his related request to continue the retrial to a date in late April 2027,” recording that the later date came from the defense.

Federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton had asked in March for a retrial beginning October 5 or 12 this year. Storm’s lawyers called that premature while the acquittal motion was live.

A Manhattan jury convicted Storm in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and split on conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. The two counts the government intends to retry carry a combined maximum of 40 years.

“Setting an example”

Storm marked the order with a tweet arguing the case is aimed at the wider industry. “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.”

He cited a February 2024 New York City Bar Association event, filed as an exhibit on his docket, at which Tara La Morte, chief of SDNY’s Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said her office wanted the industry to take notice and named the Tornado Cash prosecution as an example of bringing the sector into compliance.

In the tweet, Storm also highlighted that blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis “was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it,” pointing to trial transcripts as evidence. He added that after his lawyers subpoenaed Chainalysis to testify, “The jury never heard any of it” after the firm’s witness pleaded the fifth.

Decrypt has reached out to Chainalysis for comment.

Developers and the law

Storm’s case has drawn attention from privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin, who backed Storm in January, described himself as “an active user of privacy tools, including those developed by Roman.” 

It is not the only prosecution of its kind. Alexey Pertsev, who worked on Tornado Cash alongside Storm, was convicted of money laundering in the Netherlands in May 2024 and sentenced to 64 months. He was released to electronic monitoring in February 2025 while appealing, and the Ethereum Foundation has pledged $1.25 million toward his defense.

In the U.S., Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill pleaded guilty to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and were sentenced in November 2025 to five and four years respectively. U.S. President Donald Trump told Decrypt in December he would take a look at a pardon for Rodriguez, who began serving his sentence days later.

Storm’s case sits awkwardly beside the Justice Department’s own guidance. Days after his guilty verdict, Matthew Galeotti, then acting head of the department’s criminal division, said prosecutors would no longer approve charges under the statute Storm was convicted on where software is decentralized and non-custodial, a policy he specified would apply going forward.

Storm has not yet been sentenced on the money transmitting count, which carries up to five years.