Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash Retrial Delayed to April 2027

Retrial Postponed Pending Acquittal Decision

Federal Judge Katherine Polk Failla has pushed back the retrial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm to April 26, 2027, delaying the proceeding by more than six months. The order, entered Tuesday in the Southern District of New York, relocates the trial to the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse and realigns the pretrial schedule accordingly. The postponement comes as Storm’s motion for acquittal—argued before the court on April 9—remains undecided, with the judge citing both the pending motion and the defense’s request for the later date as reasons for the delay.

Federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton had originally sought to begin the retrial in October 2026, but Storm’s legal team successfully argued that moving forward while the acquittal motion was live would be premature. The court sided with the defense, excluding the intervening time from Speedy Trial Act calculations, effectively removing the delay from statutory timelines.

August 2025 Conviction and Jury Deadlock

Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, a conviction carrying serious penalties. However, the jury could not reach unanimous verdicts on the two weightiest charges: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. Those deadlocked counts carry a combined maximum sentence of 40 years, prompting the government to pursue a retrial specifically on those two charges.

The case has drawn significant attention from privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, given its implications for how regulators and prosecutors view privacy-focused cryptocurrency protocols.

Storm Challenges the Prosecution’s Broader Aims

Through social media, Storm has contested what he characterizes as the case’s wider industry focus. He pointed to a February 2024 event at the New York City Bar Association where officials from the Southern District of New York’s Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit discussed using the Tornado Cash prosecution as an example to bring the cryptocurrency sector into compliance—raising questions about whether the case targets his specific conduct or serves a broader deterrent purpose against privacy tools.

Storm also highlighted potential conflicts of interest, citing trial evidence showing that blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis was operating its own Tornado Cash relayer and earning transaction fees through it. When Storm’s attorneys subpoenaed Chainalysis to testify, the firm’s witness declined to answer questions, invoking the Fifth Amendment. As a result, the jury never heard evidence on this arrangement.

All of Storm’s disclosures reference publicly available court filings on his docket, underscoring the transparency of the information underlying his claims about the case’s conduct and implications.

Source: U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York), via Decrypt. Not financial advice.