DOJ to retry Roman Storm in the fall on key counts despite prior jury failure and criticized evidence handling, sparking outrage over crypto privacy, mixers, and aggressive prosecution tactics

The U.S. Department of Justice has decided to retry Tornado Cash co‑founder Roman Storm on the two most serious counts—conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions—after a jury in his first trial could not reach a unanimous verdict on those charges, triggering a partial mistrial. In that August 2025 trial in the Southern District of New York, the jury delivered a mixed outcome: it convicted Storm on one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, but deadlocked on the money‑laundering and sanctions‑violation conspiracies, leaving the government to decide whether to pursue a retrial on those hung counts. Storm was originally indicted in August 2023 alongside co‑founder Roman Semenov, accused of creating and operating the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer and allegedly facilitating over $1 billion in money laundering, including hundreds of millions tied to North Korea’s sanctioned Lazarus Group. Prosecutors contend that Tornado Cash functioned as an unlicensed money transmitting business and that Storm knew a substantial portion of funds passing through the service were criminal proceeds used to evade sanctions. Civil‑society and crypto advocacy groups argue that Tornado Cash is a set of non‑custodial smart contracts and that prosecuting a developer for users’ illicit activity threatens privacy tools and open‑source software development; they also criticize the government’s charging theories and evidence handling, which have become focal points of industry backlash as the DOJ presses ahead with a fall retrial on the unresolved counts.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• US v. Storm: Background & Timeline - DeFi Education Fund (defieducationfund.org)
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• Tornado Cash Founders Charged With Money Laundering And ... (justice.gov)

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