A United States federal prosecutor has requested to retry Roman Storm, the co-founder of decentralized cryptocurrency mixer protocol Tornado Cash, according to court documents submitted on March 9.

In a letter to U.S. district judge of the District Court for the Southern District of New York, Katherine Polk Failla, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said the government wants to retry Storm on two charges.

Back during his highly publicized trial this summer, Storm received a guilty verdict on the lesser of the three charges brought against him — operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. But the jury was unable to come to a verdict on the other two, namely violating U.S. sanctions and engaging in money laundering.

The U.S. Attorney said in the retrial request that he expects the trial on the two remaining counts to take three weeks, and asks that it begin in October of this year.

Storm took to X today in response to the retrial request, writing:

“A jury of 12 Americans heard 4 weeks of evidence and deadlocked: no verdict on money laundering, and no verdict on sanctions violations. The government’s response? Try again to make writing code a crime.”

Storm also noted in his X post that if found guilty on the two counts, he could face up to 40 years in prison. He also referenced recent regulatory shifts in the U.S. that have come out in defense of decentralized protocol developers.

Specifically, he noted, a new report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury to Congress this week states, “Lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy when transacting through public blockchains.”

Also noted by Storm in today’s X post, last March, the U.S. Treasury removed Tornado Cash from its list of sanctioned entities, as The Defiant reported at the time. The protocol had been banned in the U.S. since 2022.

The US v Roman Storm

Tornado Cash is a non-custodial protocol that lets users anonymize their transactions on multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchains. The platform and Storm personally have received overwhelming support from the crypto industry for their focus on privacy throughout a multi-year legal battle with the U.S. government.

Storm was first indicted by the U.S. government in August 2023. The U.S. Department of Justice alleged that Storm and his fellow co-founder Roman Semenov were aware of the platform’s usage by criminal organizations for laundering illicit funds, and claimed that the two are responsible for more than $1 billion in laundered crypto.

Prosecutors also alleged that the two developers in some cases helped launder funds, “including by laundering hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of a state-sponsored North Korean cybercrime group sanctioned by the U.S. government,” referring to the notorious Lazarus Group.

Semenov has yet to face trial for the alleged charges, and remains on the FBI’s wanted list since 2023, when the indictment came out and a federal warrant for his arrest was issued.

In a motion to dismiss filed by Storm’s lawyers in 2024, the developer pleaded not guilty, and argued that he “is a developer, and his only agreement, together with the members of his U.S.-based company, was to build software solutions to provide financial privacy to legitimate cryptocurrency users.”

As the Defiant previously reported, the outcome of Storm’s legal battle could significantly influence the future of DeFi, especially in the U.S., and set a precedent for how responsible DeFi developers are for how users interact with protocols.

Last February, the third founding developer of Tornado Cash, Alexey Pertsev was released from prison to house arrest in the Netherlands, where is serving an over five year sentence for money laundering related to Tornado Cash. He was arrest in 2022 and found guilty in 2024. After his most recent attempt to appeal the decision in June, Pertsev was allowed to remove his ankle monitor, though his movement remains resitricted to The Netherlans and he is unable to work, per an X post from the dev in October.

In November of last year, the two co-founders of another crypto mixer protocol, Samourai Wallet, were found guilty in a U.S. federal court of “a conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business in which they knowingly transmitted criminal proceeds.”

Samourai Wallet’s Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill were sentenced to five and four years in prison, respectively.

This article was generated with the assistance of AI workflows.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has submitted a report to Congress examining how emerging technologies can be used to detect and prevent illicit financial activity involving digital assets. The report was required under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, signed into law in July 2025.

The report notes that victims reported over $9 billion in digital asset-related fraud losses to the FBI in 2024, with investment scams accounting for $5.8 billion, a 47 percent increase over the prior year. North Korean cybercriminals stole at least $2.8 billion in digital assets between January 2024 and September 2025, including $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025. Meanwhile, ransomware payments, predominantly made in digital assets, totaled approximately $734 million in 2024.

The report also examines the use of cryptocurrency mixers and similar obfuscation tools, finding that roughly $1.6 billion in deposits to major cross-chain bridges between 2020 and 2025 originated from mixing services.

To address these risks, Treasury identified four key technologies for broader adoption by financial institutions: artificial intelligence for transaction monitoring and fraud detection; digital identity tools to reduce onboarding fraud; blockchain analytics to trace suspicious activity; and application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve interoperability across compliance systems.

On decentralized finance (DeFi), the report recommends that Congress clarify which DeFi participants should be subject to anti-money laundering obligations.

Treasury acknowledged barriers to adoption, including high costs for smaller institutions and regulatory uncertainty, and committed to issuing new guidance, partnering with NIST on technical standards, and pursuing legislative options, including potentially allowing institutions to temporarily freeze digital assets suspected of involvement in illegal activity.

Ethereum is still trading within a broader bearish structure, but the recent price action shows signs of short-term stabilization above a key support zone. After the sharp selloff seen in early February, ETH has managed to base around the $1,800 area, and buyers are hoping for another push higher, although the market still needs a stronger breakout to confirm a more meaningful recovery.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily chart, ETH remains below the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, which keeps the higher timeframe trend tilted to the downside. The asset is also still trading inside a descending channel, while the $2,400 and $2,800 zones continue to act as the main resistance barriers on any larger rebound.

At the same time, the market has been holding above the blue demand region around $1,800 to $1,700, which is currently the most important support range. As long as ETH stays above this area, the structure can remain constructive in the short term, but a daily reclaim of the $2,400 region is still needed to suggest that the broader bearish pressure is starting to weaken.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

On the 4-hour chart, ETH is gradually moving higher from the late February lows and is now pressing toward the $2,150 resistance level once again. The formation of a rising short-term trendline from the recent swing lows also points to improving momentum, while the RSI has pushed back above the midline and supports the case for a stronger recovery attempt.

Still, the price has not broken out yet, and the $2,150 level remains the key trigger in the near term. A clean move above it could open the way toward the $2,400 supply zone, while another rejection would likely keep ETH stuck inside its current range and send it back toward the $1,800 support levels.

On-Chain Analysis

From an on-chain perspective, Ethereum’s exchange reserve continues to trend lower and has now dropped to around 16.1 million ETH, which is a notable long-term bullish signal. The persistent decline suggests that more coins are being moved away from exchanges, typically reflecting lower immediate sell pressure and a stronger preference for holding rather than distributing.

That said, the exchange reserve trend is a supportive background factor rather than a direct timing signal. In the short term, ETH still needs price confirmation through a breakout above nearby resistance, but the continued drawdown in exchange balances does strengthen the idea that downside pressure may be more limited than before if demand starts to improve.

Societe Generale-FORGE, the crypto arm of French banking company Societe Generale, has deployed its euro-denominated stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, completing a multichain expansion first announced in 2025.

The stablecoin, known as EUR CoinVertible (EURCV), is designed to comply with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework and represents a tokenized euro issued by the company for use in digital asset markets.

According to the company, the Stellar deployment is intended to broaden the stablecoin’s use across blockchain-based financial applications and tokenized asset services.

SG-FORGE said Stellar offers high transaction throughput, low network fees and built-in support for tokenized assets. The network also includes a decentralized exchange that allows users to trade digital assets directly onchain.

Societe Generale-FORGE first launched the EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) stablecoin on Ethereum in April 2023. The stablecoin is fully backed by reserves consisting of bank deposits and high-quality liquid assets on a one-to-one basis, and has a current market cap of around $452 million, according to DefiLlama data.

The development comes weeks after SG-FORGE deployed EUR CoinVertible on the XRP Ledger, then marking the token’s third blockchain network after Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL).

In January, the stablecoin was used by global banking network SWIFT in a pilot that demonstrated the exchange and settlement of tokenized bonds using both fiat and digital currencies.

Related: Stablecoin payments startup Kast raises $80M at $600M valuation: Report

European stablecoin push

Despite growing interest in euro-denominated tokens, the stablecoin market remains dominated by US dollar-backed assets. Tether’s USDT (USDT) holds a market capitalization of about $185 billion, representing nearly 60% of the sector, while Circle’s USDC (USDC) accounts for roughly $78 billion.

Adoption of digital dollars accelerated in the US after the GENIUS Act passed in July 2025, providing regulatory clarity for stablecoin issuers. Total market capitalization has climbed from around $260 billion on July 20 to more than $314 billion today, per DefiLlama data.

Meanwhile, Europe has taken a more restrictive regulatory approach. The European Union’s MiCA framework introduced new rules for stablecoin issuers in June 2024, requiring companies operating in the European Economic Area to obtain an e-money license in at least one EU member state.

The regulation prompted several exchanges, including Coinbase, OKX, Bitstamp, Uphold and Binance, to remove or restrict support for stablecoins that had not secured authorization under the framework. Tether also decided it would discontinue its euro-pegged stablecoin EURT.

In November, European Central Bank officials warned that the growth of US dollar–backed stablecoins could weaken Europe’s monetary sovereignty by increasing reliance on dollar-denominated digital assets.

Magazine: The debate over Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is over: Benjamin Cowen