Tornado Cash Co-Founder Roman Storm May Face Retrial in October as His Case Drags Into a Third Year

[cryptohog]

While the Celsius cases reach their conclusion, the legal proceedings around Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm remain unresolved and are heading toward a potential retrial. A jury failed to reach a verdict on two of the charges Storm faced — money laundering conspiracy and sanctions violation conspiracy — in his trial last year, resulting in a hung jury on those counts. Prosecutors have requested that a judge schedule a retrial in October to retry Storm on those deadlocked charges, keeping the case alive well into 2026. Storm remains under $2 million bail with geographic restrictions limiting him to certain areas of New York, Washington, and California, though a federal judge granted him permission on Thursday to attend his niece's high school graduation in El Dorado Hills, California — a small but humanizing detail in a case that has become one of the most closely watched in the crypto legal landscape.

The Tornado Cash prosecution carries stakes that go well beyond Storm as an individual defendant because the core legal question it raises — whether the developers of non-custodial open-source privacy software can be held criminally liable for how others use it — has no clear precedent in US law. The government's theory is that Storm conspired to launder money and violate sanctions through Tornado Cash's operation, while the defense argues that writing and deploying code is protected activity and that Storm had no control over how users chose to interact with immutable smart contracts. A conviction on retrial would establish a significant legal precedent for open-source crypto development; an acquittal or another hung jury would leave the question unresolved and create continued uncertainty for developers building privacy tools. The October timeline means the crypto industry will be watching closely as one of the most consequential cases for developer liability in blockchain history moves toward its next phase.

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Hung jury on two counts keeping crypto's most consequential developer case alive

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Most consequential crypto dev case ongoing

[chainsniff]

Code as crime, still legally unresolved