A federal judge has moved Roman Storm’s retrial to April 26, 2027. The new date is roughly six months later than prosecutors wanted. Storm, one of Tornado Cash’s co-founders, asked for the delay. His defense cited scheduling conflicts and said a pending motion to overturn his existing conviction should be resolved first.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued the scheduling order on Aug. 25. A retrial had been expected around October 2026. Now expert disclosures are set for early 2027, and the final pretrial conference will happen on April 20, six days before the trial is due to begin.
Still facing two charges
Storm already faces conviction on one count. A jury in Manhattan found him guilty in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The same jury could not agree on two other counts: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. Those two charges are the ones that will go back to trial. Each carries up to 20 years in prison.
The unresolved Rule 29 motion adds another layer. Storm filed it on Sept. 30, 2025. He argued prosecutors did not present enough evidence to support the guilty verdict. The judge heard arguments in April 2026 but has not ruled yet. If she grants the motion, the money transmitting conviction could be thrown out. If not, that conviction stays while the retrial moves forward.
Tornado Cash background matters
Tornado Cash is a privacy protocol built on Ethereum. It lets users deposit crypto into smart contracts and withdraw to different addresses, which makes transactions harder to trace. The Treasury Department sanctioned the protocol in August 2022, alleging that over $1 billion in criminal proceeds had moved through it, including funds tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
That sanction was eventually removed. A federal appeals court ruled in November 2024 that immutable smart contracts could not be treated as property under U.S. sanctions law. Treasury lifted the designation in March 2025. But the criminal case against Storm did not end because of that. Prosecutors continued to argue that his conduct before and during the indicted period supported the conspiracy charges.
Control remains the core issue
The main question in the retrial is how much control a developer has over a decentralized protocol. Prosecutors say Storm and his co-founder helped manage parts of Tornado Cash, promoted its use, and profited from it while knowing criminals used it. The defense says the smart contracts ran on their own and Storm never controlled individual transactions or held user funds.
Support for Storm has come from parts of the crypto community. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin asked for sentencing leniency in early 2026 and said privacy software can serve lawful purposes. More than $6.3 million has been raised for Storm’s defense, with help from Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation, and other donors.
Storm remains free on bond while the proceedings continue. His next major court date, unless the Rule 29 motion changes things, will be the April 2027 pretrial conference.
