Prosecutors Push for Tornado Cash Developer Retrial One Day After Treasury Said Mixers Have Legitimate Uses
A Manhattan jury spent four weeks last summer hearing evidence in the case against Roman Storm, the Auburn, Washington-based developer who co-founded Tornado Cash, an open-source, non-custodial Ethereum mixer that allowed users to conduct private transactions using zero-knowledge proofs.
On August 6, 2025, Storm was convicted on one count: conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. On two heavier charges such as conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate North Korea sanctions. The charges deadlocked after four days of deliberations and a direct Allen charge from the judge urging jurors to keep trying.
That hung jury left the door open for prosecutors to try again. On Monday, US Attorney Jay Clayton notified the court that the government intends to use it, proposing October 5 or 12 as a start date for a retrial expected to last three weeks.
Storm responded on X within hours: “The 2 counts = up to 40 years in federal prison. For writing open-source code. For a protocol I don’t control. For transactions I never touched. A jury already couldn’t agree this was criminal. But the SDNY prosecutors want to keep trying with the hope of getting a different answer.”
He also said he has exhausted his legal defense fund. The DeFi Education Fund and the Ethereum Foundation have contributed to Storm’s defense, pushing the total past $5 million, and the Solana Policy Institute, which pledged $500,000 last year, called Monday’s move “depressing.” More than 65 crypto organizations have urged President Trump to intervene.
The Government’s Theory and Its Limits
The prosecution’s central argument at trial was that Storm knowingly continued operating Tornado Cash after learning that criminals, including North Korea’s Lazarus Group, following the Ronin bridge hack, were using it to launder stolen funds.
Prosecutors cited internal messages and noted that at least 96% of users accessed the protocol through a front-end website Storm and his co-founders controlled and updated more than 250 times.
The defense maintained that the smart contracts themselves are immutable and permissionless; once deployed, no one, including Storm, could stop them from executing. The jury’s inability to reach agreement on the two heavier charges after all of that evidence is the key data point.
Amanda Tuminelli, chief legal officer at the DeFi Education Fund, said prosecutors had made “obvious mistakes” at trial, including “calling irrelevant witnesses and not understanding the forensic analysis of their own blockchain evidence.”
The DOJ’s Own Policy Makes This Retrial Awkward
The retrial lands in an awkward policy moment. In April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo directing the DOJ to stop “regulation by prosecution” of digital assets. Prosecutors responded by dropping the FinCEN registration component before Storm’s first trial, but kept the allegation that Storm knowingly transmitted criminal proceeds, framing it as conduct, not regulation.
Prosecutors appear to view the Blanche Memo as limited to purely regulatory violations, leaving knowing facilitation of criminal conduct in scope. That interpretation is legally defensible but politically complicated given the administration’s public embrace of crypto.
For context, the Blanche Memo issued in April 2025 by Todd Blanche instructed DOJ prosecutors to stop pursuing “regulation by prosecution” against the crypto industry, meaning cases where the government was essentially using criminal charges to set policy on digital assets rather than relying on Congress to pass legislation.
The timing, one day after Treasury told Congress mixers have legitimate uses, has not been lost on Storm’s supporters. Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute, said the filing made passing the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which would bar non-custodial developers from being classified as money transmitters, “all the more critical.”
