Roman Storm Retrial Pushed to April 2027 in Tornado Cash Case
The retrial of Roman Storm, co-founder of the Ethereum privacy mixer Tornado Cash, has been postponed to April 26, 2027, according to cryptobriefing.com. US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ordered the delay on August 25, 2026, pointing to Storm’s still-unresolved motion for acquittal, which has been pending for nearly a year.
Storm was tried in summer 2025 in the Southern District of New York on three federal counts. A jury convicted him of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, which carries a maximum five-year sentence. Jurors deadlocked on two more serious charges, money laundering conspiracy and sanctions violations, each punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors chose to retry Storm on those two counts.
Storm’s defense filed a Rule 29 motion for acquittal on September 30, 2025, arguing the government’s evidence was insufficient for the conviction. Oral arguments took place in April 2026, but Judge Failla had not ruled by the time of the August order, which cryptobriefing.com reported as the central reason for the delay.
The retrial had originally been set for October 2026. The defense requested it be pushed to no earlier than April 2027 citing scheduling conflicts, a request prosecutors opposed. Judge Failla sided with the defense and reset the pretrial calendar, with expert disclosures due in early 2027 and a final pretrial conference set for April 20, 2027.
Tornado Cash, a smart contract protocol that obscures transaction trails on Ethereum, was sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in August 2022 over claims it facilitated over $1 billion in illicit activity. The case centers on whether developers can face criminal liability for software later misused by others, a question with implications for privacy-focused crypto projects and tokens such as TORN, Tornado Cash’s governance token.
Based on reporting by cryptobriefing.com.
