Tornado Cash Dev Roman Storm Could Face Retrial

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.