Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are seeking an October retrial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on the two charges a jury could not unanimously resolve last summer, setting up a fresh clash between the government’s case theory and a newer federal policy tone that has become more accommodating toward lawful privacy tools.
Prosecutors told Judge Katherine Polk Failla in a letter filed Monday that they want to retry Storm on counts one and three of the superseding indictment, and proposed October 5 or October 12 as potential trial dates.
Those are the money-laundering conspiracy and sanctions-violation conspiracy counts that ended in a deadlock after Storm’s earlier four-week trial. Reuters reported after the verdict that the jury convicted Storm on the separate charge of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, but could not reach a verdict on the two more serious counts, each of which carries a potential 20-year sentence.
The retrial request does not reopen the entire case from scratch. It is focused on the two unresolved counts that jurors could not decide unanimously. The unlicensed money-transmitting conviction already exists, and Storm is separately trying to overturn that outcome through post-trial motions.
That distinction matters because the legal and political weight of the case sits heavily on the deadlocked counts. Those are the allegations tied most directly to whether writing and maintaining privacy infrastructure can be treated as criminal facilitation when third parties use it for illicit transactions.
The Justice Department’s original indictment in the case accused Storm and co-founder Roman Semenov of helping operate Tornado Cash as a service that laundered more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds, including funds linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
The filing arrives against a policy backdrop that has shifted noticeably since Storm was charged. In an April 7 memorandum titled “Ending Regulation By Prosecution,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote that the Justice Department “is not a digital assets regulator” and said the department would no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting regulatory violations, except where the conduct fits the department’s stated enforcement priorities
Treasury has also moved in a less categorical direction on privacy tools. In its March report to Congress under the GENIUS Act, Treasury said “lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy” on public blockchains, while also stressing that mixers remain useful to illicit actors and can complicate tracing and compliance.
That language does not legalize Tornado Cash or erase the government’s case. But it does make the optics of a retrial more complicated. On one hand, prosecutors are asking to retry a developer on money-laundering and sanctions theories tied to mixer infrastructure. On the other, senior federal policy documents now explicitly recognize that mixing tools can serve lawful privacy purposes and that the department should not act as a de facto digital-asset regulator.
The legal environment around Tornado Cash itself has also shifted. Treasury removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list in March after reviewing the legal and policy issues raised by applying sanctions to the service.
That delisting did not end criminal exposure for the developers, but it narrowed the gap between the government’s older sanctions posture and its newer treatment of mixer technology. It also gives Storm’s defense a stronger narrative line to press if the case returns to trial: that federal institutions themselves are no longer speaking about mixers in the same absolute terms they did when the prosecution began.
The broader significance of the retrial request goes well beyond Storm personally. The case remains one of the clearest U.S. tests of where criminal liability begins for developers of open-source privacy software that they do not directly control after launch.
If prosecutors move ahead in October, the retrial will likely sharpen that question even further. The government would be asking a second jury to decide whether the unresolved conduct amounted to money laundering and sanctions conspiracy even after one jury could not agree, even after Tornado Cash was removed from sanctions lists, and even after Treasury and DOJ adopted more nuanced public language around mixers.
That is why the case continues to matter to privacy advocates, DeFi builders, and legal observers alike. It is not only about one protocol or one developer. It is about whether U.S. criminal law will treat privacy-enabling code as neutral infrastructure, as a regulated service, or as something close enough to direct facilitation that prosecutors can keep pressing for decades of exposure when illicit use is proven around it.
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