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A split verdict left the hardest questions unanswered. With a retrial proposed and an acquittal motion pending, United States v. Storm remains the defining test of whether writing code can be a crime.
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Hon. Katherine Polk Failla)
The prosecution of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm has become the defining test of whether—and how—the federal criminal law reaches those who write software for decentralized financial protocols. Storm was charged in connection with a non-custodial cryptocurrency mixer that obscures the trail of blockchain transactions and that the government alleges was used to launder more than a billion dollars, including funds tied to North Korean hacking operations. The indictment charged conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business under 18 U.S.C. § 1960, conspiracy to commit money laundering under 18 U.S.C. § 1956, and conspiracy to violate sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The first trial, in August 2025, produced a split result that left the central questions unanswered. A jury convicted Storm on the Section 1960 count—operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business—but deadlocked on the money-laundering and sanctions counts, resulting in a partial mistrial on the two charges that carry the heaviest exposure. Storm's defense has maintained throughout that he authored open-source code for a protocol he did not control and never took custody of user funds, framing the prosecution as an attempt to criminalize software development itself.
The case is now in an unusually layered posture. The government has moved to retry Storm on the two deadlocked counts, proposing dates in October 2026, while Storm's Rule 29 motion for a judgment of acquittal remains pending before Judge Failla following argument in the spring of 2026. That motion presses both a substantive theory—that keeping a decentralized protocol running and pushing software updates cannot amount to the charged conduct—and a venue challenge questioning whether the Southern District of New York was the proper forum. Sentencing on the Section 1960 conviction has yet to occur, and its timing relative to any retrial remains open.
The prosecution proceeds against a shifting policy backdrop. Federal authorities have publicly signaled a retreat from "regulation by prosecution" of digital-asset infrastructure and have acknowledged that privacy-preserving tools have lawful uses—positions that sit uneasily beside a decision to retry a developer on charges exposing him to decades in prison. That tension between stated enforcement policy and litigation conduct is itself part of the case's significance.
At its core, United States v. Storm asks whether writing and maintaining code that others use for unlawful ends can support criminal liability, and how the money-transmission statutes apply to software that never touches customer funds. The answer will reverberate across the decentralized-finance sector, where developers have watched the case as a referendum on the legal status of the code they publish.
Prosecutors asked the court to set the retrial to begin on or about October 5 or October 12, 2026, on the two counts the first jury could not resolve. Storm faces a combined maximum of 40 additional years on those counts, on top of the five-year maximum on the Section 1960 conviction.
The Rule 29 motion for a judgment of acquittal was argued in the spring of 2026 and remains pending. If it is granted, the conviction disappears without an appeal, and the calculus around a retrial changes entirely.
The government is not required to retry deadlocked counts. It chooses to. Doing so here, after publicly stepping back from prosecuting digital-asset infrastructure for what end users do with it, is a choice worth naming rather than treating as procedure.
The practical question for the defense is whether a second jury sees the case differently. First trials produce a transcript of every government witness, which is the most valuable cross-examination material a defense lawyer can have. Retrials frequently go worse for the government for exactly that reason.
Pull the current filings here: United States v. Storm. Scheduling orders, the Rule 29 ruling, and any superseding filings will post to the docket before they are reported, and case alerts will surface them.
The first trial, the charges, and what the mixed verdict actually established are covered in the Tornado Cash prosecution. For a case where a jury similarly rejected the government's most ambitious theory, read the Sean Combs case. And for a prosecution where the court cut the government's theory before any jury heard it, see the Mangione death penalty ruling.