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A jury convicted the Tornado Cash co-founder on one count and deadlocked on the two most serious ones. The case is the closest thing there is to a ruling on whether writing and publishing code can be a crime.
On August 6, 2025, after a four-week trial in the Southern District of New York, a jury convicted Roman Storm on one count and could not agree on the other two. He was found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The jury deadlocked on conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate sanctions.
That split is the story. The government won the regulatory count and failed to win the two counts that would have established that publishing code makes you responsible for what people do with it.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Caption | United States v. Roman Storm |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York |
| Docket | 1:23-cr-00430 |
| Indicted | August 2023 |
| Counts | Conspiracy to commit money laundering; conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business; conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act |
| Trial | July to August 2025 |
| Verdict | August 6, 2025; guilty on the unlicensed money transmitting count, hung on the other two |
| Status | Post-trial motions; the government has sought a retrial on the deadlocked counts |
Tornado Cash is a set of smart contracts on Ethereum that break the link between a deposit address and a withdrawal address. Deposit funds, wait, withdraw to a different address, and the on-chain trail is obscured.
The contracts are immutable. Once deployed, no one can alter or stop them, including the people who wrote them. That fact is the defense's entire case, and it is technically accurate.
The government's position is that the founders built the service, marketed it, maintained the front end that most users interacted with, took fees, and continued after they knew North Korean state actors were laundering stolen funds through it.
Section 1960 of Title 18 makes it a crime to conduct an unlicensed money transmitting business. The threshold question is whether publishing immutable code that other people use constitutes conducting a money transmitting business. If it does, every developer of a non-custodial protocol has criminal exposure. If it does not, sanctioned actors have a permanent laundering channel that no one is answerable for.
The money laundering conspiracy count required proof that Storm agreed to launder criminal proceeds, which means proving intent about specific transactions rather than general knowledge of misuse.
The sanctions count under IEEPA required proof of an agreement to violate sanctions. That count sat awkwardly with the underlying regulatory history: OFAC designated Tornado Cash addresses in August 2022 and removed the designation in March 2025, after the Fifth Circuit held in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury that immutable smart contracts are not "property" that can be blocked.
The jury convicted on the regulatory count and could not agree on the two intent-heavy ones. Mayer Brown's analysis reads the verdict as leaving developer liability genuinely unsettled, which is the fair reading.
It does not establish that writing code is a crime. A hung jury decides nothing.
It does establish that a jury was willing to find a conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business on these facts. Section 1960 carries a five-year maximum, which is modest next to the exposure on the other two counts, but the conviction itself is the precedent that matters to anyone building financial infrastructure.
The DeFi Education Fund and other groups have followed the case closely for exactly that reason, and publish updates on the posture.
Storm moved for a judgment of acquittal under Rule 29, with argument set for April 9, 2026. If granted, the conviction goes away without an appeal.
The government has asked to retry the two deadlocked counts. We cover that separately in the Tornado Cash retrial.
Sentencing on the count of conviction will not happen until the retrial question resolves, because a court sentencing on one count while related counts are pending would have to redo the analysis afterward.
Pull the current filings here: United States v. Roman Storm. Post-trial criminal motion practice generates the most substantive documents in a case, Rule 29 briefing especially, and case alerts will catch them as they post.
Of the three charges, the one the jury reached agreement on is the one with the least demanding mental state.
Section 1960 prohibits conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business. It does not require proof that the defendant intended to launder criminal proceeds or to violate sanctions. Depending on the subsection, it can be satisfied by operating without the required registration, whether or not the defendant knew registration was required.
That structure is why the government charges it. It converts a fight about intent into a fight about whether the defendant was operating a money transmitting business at all.
For open-source developers, that is exactly the wrong question to lose. If deploying immutable contracts and maintaining a front end is conducting a money transmitting business, the exposure does not depend on what anyone intended.
A hung jury creates no precedent. The two counts the jury could not decide, money laundering conspiracy and sanctions conspiracy, are the ones that would have told developers whether publishing code can make you responsible for what strangers do with it.
That question is still open, which is why the retrial matters more than the conviction does.
For a case where a jury rejected the government's most ambitious theory and convicted on a narrower one, read the Sean Combs case. For a Supreme Court decision limiting when an intermediary answers for what its users do, see Cox Communications v. Sony Music. And for a fraud prosecution built on the same kind of intent evidence the Storm jury could not agree on, see the Theranos verdict.