BREAKING: Tornado Cash dev Storm guilty of money transmission — but jurors deadlocked on most severe charges

Jurors delivered a split verdict in the criminal trial of Roman Storm on Tuesday, finding the Tornado Cash co-founder guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

But they were unable to reach a verdict on two other charges: conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to evade sanctions.

The money transmission charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The money laundering and sanctions evasion charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

While Storm, 36, dodges the most severe charges, the lone guilty verdict was a loss for the crypto industry, which took particular umbrage with the charge the software engineer had conspired to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

That charge does not accurately reflect the way Tornado Cash and many other crypto protocols operate, and the verdict could chill the development of such software, according to Storm’s supporters.

“It should be clear from the plain language of the statute that to transfer funds on behalf of the public, you have to have that person’s funds in your possession, custody or control,” Amanda Tuminelli, executive director at the DeFi Education Fund, told DL News.

At no point did Tornado Cash — or its developers — have that sort of control, according to Tuminelli.

“The principle guiding the DOJ charges in this case is limitless,” she said. “It basically says that any person who creates a tool that somebody else uses ... is responsible for that third party’s conduct.”

Nevertheless, the verdict wasn’t disastrous, according to Tuminelli. While Storm’s conviction could encourage other prosecutors to bring similar charges, it doesn’t bind any court or jury — a judge presiding over a similar case can still dismiss a money transmission charge.

Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, trumpeted the verdict in a brief statement on Wednesday.

“Roman Storm and Tornado Cash provided a service for North Korean hackers and other criminals to move and hide more than $1 billion of dirty money,” Clayton said.

“The speed, efficiency, and functionality of stablecoins and other digital assets offer great promise, but that promise cannot be an excuse for criminality.”

Defence attorney Brian Klein said Storm would challenge his conviction.

“We are grateful the jury did not convict Roman for violating sanctions or laundering money,” Klein said in a statement.

“There are serious legal issues with the sole remaining money transmitting count. We will not stop fighting for Roman, and expect him to be fully vindicated.”

Because jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict on two counts, prosecutors can attempt to retry Storm on both.

Flight risk?

A naturalised US citizen, Storm was arrested in August 2023. But he was quickly released on a $2 million property bond secured against one of his houses. Authorities seized his passport, and courts imposed restrictions on his ability to travel and to transfer his crypto holdings.

On Wednesday, Judge Katherine Polk Failla denied prosecutors’ request to detain Storm while he awaits his sentence.

Prosecutors argued Storm presented a flight risk, given his ties to Russia, his ownership of an estimated $16 million in cryptocurrency, his musing about fleeing the country amid regulatory scrutiny in 2022, and an alleged effort to help US immigrants lie in order to receive asylum status.

They also pointed to the “support of a broad crypto community,” which includes “high profile individuals with significant resources.”

Defence attorney Keri Axel said Storm had been out on bond for two years and dutifully attended everything required of him. Moreover, he has deep ties to the US, she said: most of his friends and immediate family live in the country, including his parents, who have permanent resident status.

And his supporters in the crypto community are, by and large, based in the US, Axel continued.

Finally, his alleged advice to asylum seekers was directed at friends in Russia and Ukraine who were fleeing war, according to the attorney.

Failla sided with the defence, noting Storm’s bond; his ties to the United States, which includes a five-year-old daughter living in Seattle; and the likelihood he would continue to contest the money transmission charge on appeal.

“There is a lot of fighting left in this case,” Failla said.

Fatemeh Fannizadeh, an independent crypto lawyer who attended Storm’s trial, said she was disappointed he was not acquitted.

“Nonetheless, I think that the outcome is pretty positive,” she told DL News, standing outside the courthouse in lower Manhattan.

“I’m bullish for what is yet to come, which is the appeal and the political pressure that can lead to the prosecution deciding not to retry the case.”

Leaving the courthouse, Storm declined to speak to a gaggle of reporters and supporters.

“I’m just gonna say: we’re gonna keep fighting,” he said.

‘Privacy is not a crime’

The verdict caps a three-and-a-half week long courtroom drama.

Storm, dressed in software developer formal — crisp button-down shirts, chinos, and dressy sneakers — sat impassive throughout.

The cavernous courtroom was filled with a rotating cast of supporters and observers, including reporters, prominent crypto developers, industry lawyers, privacy advocates, summer interns at the US Attorney’s Office, and staff from the DeFi Education Fund, a crypto advocacy firm.

During the first week of the trial, Tim Clancy, an advisor to the Ethereum Foundation who had personally donated more than $100,000 to Storm’s defence, arrived to show his support.

He had brought a copy of “PGP: Source Code and Internals,” a book by a software engineer who was investigated by US authorities in the 1990s after publishing the source code for an encryption protocol called Pretty Good Privacy.

Clancy had spent $600 to buy the book, he told DL News, hoping to have Storm sign the copy so he could auction it — and then donate the proceeds to Storm’s defence.

“We don’t want him to be martyred,” Clancy said.

The morning of July 30, with closing arguments moments away, a group of supporters stood outside the courthouse holding signs that read “Privacy is not a crime,” “Defend coding freedom,” and “Free Roman Storm.”

Tornado Cash tumult

The verdict is also the culmination of three tumultuous years for Tornado Cash and its founders.

The crypto mixer makes it difficult, if not impossible, to trace users’ crypto transactions on Ethereum and several other blockchains. That has made the protocol popular with privacy-minded crypto users and cybercriminals alike.

In March 2022, the chain of events that would lead to Storm’s trial kicked off when hackers affiliated with North Korea stole about $600 million in crypto from the Robin bridge, software that connects the Ronin and Ethereum blockchains.

The hackers proceeded to launder some $500 million of that through Tornado Cash, alarming the founders. For years, the pariah state has been subject to sanctions from the US and its allies for its long running effort to build a nuclear weapon. That effort is funded, in part, from the proceeds of its various cybercrimes.

“Shit might seriously hit the fucking fan now,” co-founder Roman Semenov wrote his colleagues that month, according to evidence presented at trial.

He was right.

In August 2022, the US sanctioned Tornado Cash, citing its use by hackers affiliated with Pyongyang. That month, Dutch authorities arrested co-founder Alexey Pertsev. A three-judge panel found him guilty of money laundering in 2024 and sentenced him to more than five years in prison. He is currently appealing his conviction.

In 2023, the US charged Storm and Semenov, and arrested Storm at his home in the Seattle suburbs. The US Treasury Department also sanctioned Semenov, who is still at-large.

But the industry fought back. Bankrolled by crypto exchange Coinbase, six Tornado Cash users successfully sued the Treasury Department in 2022, arguing that sanctioning a mere tool such as Tornado Cash was an unprecedented — and unconstitutional — overreach.

In March 2025, the Treasury Department removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list. A month later, a district court ruled the agency could not re-sanction the protocol.

It was a massive victory for the industry. Storm’s attorneys quickly asked the court to reconsider dismissing the government’s charges against him.

But Judge Failla rejected their request.

While an appellate court found the Treasury Department could not sanction Tornado Cash’s “immutable smart contracts” because they are “not capable of being owned,” Storm’s alleged crimes involved other aspects of the protocol, Failla said.

Road to Storm’s trial

Federal prosecutors trumpeted Storm’s arrest in August 2022.

“While publicly claiming to offer a technically sophisticated privacy service, Storm and Semenov in fact knew that they were helping hackers and fraudsters conceal the fruits of their crimes,” then-US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

Storm immediately began to raise money for his defence. He would eventually raise more than $4.7 million. Donors included Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.

“You created Tornado in significant part because of my suggestion that it is something worth building,” Buterin wrote on X.

“It would violate basic honour for me to do that, and then fail to support you in your hour of need.”

Storm retained a team led by defence attorney Brian Klein, of Los Angeles-based Waymaker. Klein has defended several high-profile crypto clients, including US crypto exchange Kraken. In May, he convinced a federal judge in New York to vacate a guilty verdict against Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg.

Storm’s attorneys argued Tornado Cash runs on self-executing software developers cannot change, upgrade, or control — in other words, that he had no hand in what may have happened on the platform.

As such, he’s really being prosecuted for writing the code, they argued.

“It is well established that computer code is speech the First Amendment protects,” Storm’s attorneys wrote in a 2023 letter asking Failla to dismiss the case.

“Yet, all three counts here seek to criminalise the development and publication of code and the maintenance of a website that provided open-source software.”

Moreover, guidance from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, suggested that the agency didn’t consider Tornado Cash a money transmitter, the attorneys said.

At a hearing last September, however, Failla denied Storm’s request that she dismiss the case. She expressed deep skepticism of the notion that writing and then deploying the Tornado Cash protocol was protected by the First Amendment.

She also shot down Storm’s other arguments for dismissing the case before trial.

Control over the protocol was “not a necessary requirement” for the money laundering charge, she said. Nor was his direct participation in the “underlying criminal activity.”

And Tornado Cash is “not meaningfully different” from crypto mixers recognised as money transmitting businesses in earlier court cases, the judge added.

“This court cannot simply accept Mr. Storm’s narrative that he is being prosecuted merely for writing code,” she said.

“For starters, that’s an overstatement of what’s actually charged in the indictment. What is more, if the jury ultimately accepts his narrative, then it will acquit.”

On the eve of the trial, Failla barred either side from raising the First Amendment, FinCEN, or the Tornado Cash sanctions in front of jurors, according to a report from The Rage.

The trial

Storm’s trial began in earnest on July 15 in a courtroom in lower Manhattan.

The 12 jurors skewed young and well-educated — 10 were younger than 50, and five were younger than 30. Nine had college degrees. Seven were women, and five were men.

During opening arguments, prosecutors said that Storm ran “and profited from a giant washing machine for dirty money — and he knew it.”

Defence attorney Keri Axel, in turn, said Tornado Cash is a “legitimate software project backed by US investors,” adding that most of its users were normal people seeking privacy on Ethereum.

“How would you feel if someone took your bank account and published it on the internet?” she said. “You would not feel very safe.”

Over the next two and a half weeks, jurors heard testimony from more than a dozen government witnesses, including 23-year-old Andre Llacuna, one of the people behind a $1.1 million NFT scam.

After running off with investors’ crypto, Llacuna and his partners turned to Tornado Cash, he told jurors.

“It seemed like the best option for us to hide the money and get away with it,” Llacuna said.

Philip Werlau, a senior investigator at blockchain analytics firm AnChain.AI, testified that aspects of the Tornado Cash protocol could have been changed by Storm and his co-founders.

Specifically, the protocol’s so-called relay system had code that could have been changed to deter money laundering, Werlau said. Moreover, about 99% of all deposits to the mixer relied on the relay system.

Tornado Cash founders did take steps to limit money laundering, he acknowledged. But those measures were easily circumvented.

Most controversial of all was the testimony from Hanfeng Lin, a Taiwanese woman living in Georgia who was scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars in crypto.

Lin recounted falling for a so-called pig butchering scam in 2021. A “crypto recovery service” she hired in 2022 told her some of the stolen crypto was laundered through Tornado Cash.

But Storm’s attorneys, as well as prominent blockchain forensic experts, said they couldn’t corroborate that claim.

“[Prosecutors] called a very sympathetic alleged victim who, from our research over the weekend, we can’t find a connection between her funds and Tornado Cash,” defence attorney David Patton said.

Without that connection, Lin had “utterly no relevance” to the case, Patton said before threatening to move for a mistrial.

An agent for the Internal Revenue Service later testified he had also traced Lin’s crypto to Tornado Cash, though defence attorneys said his methods were dubious.

Prosecutors also presented a raft of private messages obtained from Pertsev’s phone, some of them damning.

In one exchange in which the co-founders discussed an upgrade to the relay system, they appeared to acknowledge they did, in fact, have meaningful control over Tornado Cash.

“The protocol seems immutable, but everyone must use the proxy,” Semenov said in February 2022, according to a government translation of a voice message he sent his co-founders.

“We kind of took back power this way. This could somehow highlight re-centralisation,” he said.

“Show me a DeFi project which has true decentralisation. Let’s take a look at how many projects have centralised potential points like ours,” Storm said in the chat later that day.

“The concerns are no doubt valid, but that’s no reason not to do correct updates.”

There were battles outside jurors’ earshot as well.

At one point, the defence appeared to suggest prosecutors were attempting to intimidate its witnesses.

Those witnesses had been ready to testify about their involvement with Tornado Cash — until they were contacted by prosecutors mid-trial, according to defence attorneys.

After the contact, both witnesses said they might invoke their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent if called to testify, defence attorneys said, appearing to imply the government had threatened prosecution if the witnesses spoke.

Prosecutors acknowledged they were considering bringing charges against executives at Tornado Cash investor Dragonfly, according to news reports, though those comments were later walked back.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi called it “outrageous.”

“We believe the government’s statement in court today was primarily to undermine a defence of Tornado Cash — to make it more difficult for the defense to call [Dragonfly Managing Partner Tom Schmidt] to testify on the stand,” Qureshi said.

Neither witness ultimately testified.

It wasn’t the only legal skirmish — early in the trial, prosecutors asked the judge to forbid any talk of privacy from anyone other than Storm himself.

That could have moved sympathetic jurors to acquit Storm even if they thought he was guilty, prosecutors said.

Failla rejected the request. But Storm’s attorneys and witnesses could not refer to a “right to privacy,” the judge ruled. Nor could they discuss “inflammatory” incidents such as the kidnapping of crypto investors and executives, which have been on the rise in 2025 and forced industry players to strengthen their security.

“There will be plenty of less inflammatory evidence in the record suggesting a need for privacy in cryptocurrency transactions,” the judge said.

When the defense made its case, it called Tornado Cash users who testified they had used the protocol to protect their privacy.

“I didn’t want the public to know where my investments are,” Columbia University adjunct professor Omid Malekan said.

“I didn’t want to put a bull’s-eye on my back,” he continued, before a prosecutor objected to the statement, which implied physical danger — apparently the kind of “inflammatory” testimony the judge had forbidden.

“The jury will disregard that last answer,” Failla said, turning to the defence. “Counsel, if you cannot control your witness, he will come right off the stand.”

The defence also called experts in an attempt to rebut Werlau’s testimony.

Cryptography expert Matt Edman testified there was little that Storm could have done to limit money laundering on Tornado Cash. Any updates to limit money laundering could easily be circumvented by using older versions of the Tornado Cash website stored on the InterPlantery File System, he said — something at least one hacker seems to have done.

During closing arguments, Patton, a defence attorney, said Storm built the protocol to solve a pressing issue in the crypto industry: the fact that every blockchain transaction and account can be viewed by anyone with internet access and a little know-how, exposing well-heeled users to scams and hacks.

Dragonfly’s $900,000 investment and significant interest from Andreessen Horowitz, another venture capital firm, suggest that Tornado Cash was regarded as a legal product that could appeal to regular people, according to Patton.

“The government has this completely, utterly wrong,” he said. “He didn’t want [scammers] to use Tornado Cash. He did not have a financial interest in them using Tornado Cash.”

Prosecutor Benjamin Gianforti told jurors the trial had given them a “front-row seat to the dark underbelly of global financial crime.”

“What do these criminals need to get away with their crimes?” he continued. “A way to make that dirty money clean.”

And he rejected claims the Tornado Cash founders were powerless to stop money laundering on the platform.

“For Tornado Cash, decentralisation was the big lie,” Gianforti said.

He also appeared to dismiss the notion that privacy-enhancing technology could have a non-criminal purpose.

“Isn’t anonymity just another word for concealment?” he said. “Remember, when the defence says ‘privacy,’ what they really mean is ‘hiding money for criminals.’”

Update, August 6: This story was updated to include comments from US Attorney Jay Clayton, defence attorney Brian Klein, Roman Storm, and others, as well as additional information regarding prosecutors’ attempt to detain Storm while he awaits his sentence.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.