Roman Storm's Tornado Cash retrial was pushed to April 2027. The reason for the delay matters more than the date.

Judge Katherine Polk Failla ordered Tuesday that the retrial will begin April 26, 2027 at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse in New York, with a final pretrial conference on April 20. Prosecutors had been pushing for October 2026.

The delay comes down to one unresolved motion. In August 2025, a jury convicted Storm on a money transmitting count but reached no verdict on the money laundering and sanctions evasion charges. Prosecutors moved to retry him on those two, which together carry a maximum of 40 years. Storm filed a motion for acquittal in September 2025 asking the court to dismiss the charges against him. Oral argument was held in April. The motion is still undecided, and the retrial is now waiting on it.

Two details from that April filing are worth knowing.

Storm's lawyers pointed the court to a recent Supreme Court ruling in a copyright case against the internet provider Cox, where the Court found Cox should not be held responsible for providing a service that some customers later misused for piracy. His attorneys argue that reasoning has implications here.

Separately, court documents showed that Chainalysis, the analytics firm that helped the government build this case, had itself operated as a Tornado Cash relayer in 2022 to earn fees. A relayer helps users withdraw from the mixer while keeping their addresses private. Storm raised it publicly this week, saying the company that traced his transactions was profiting from the same protocol he was prosecuted over.

Storm also wrote that a jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts and prosecutors still would not stop, because in his view the case was never about him but about setting an example.

Source: The Block

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