New Tornado Cash hearings set for April 26, 2027 in Southern District of New York

Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, will be back in court in April 2027 on two counts: money laundering and sanctions violations. For high-risk payments and crypto infrastructure players, the case keeps testing where the line sits between software, transaction tooling, and criminal exposure.

1. Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York set the retrial for April 26, 2027, with pretrial consultations due to finish by April 20. That gives the parties several months to prepare. Prosecutors had previously proposed hearings in October this year.
2. Storm’s motion for acquittal is still pending before the court. The first trial took place in August, when the jury found him guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, which carries up to five years in prison.
3. The same jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on the money laundering and sanctions charges. Those two counts will now be retried. If Storm is convicted on them, he faces up to 40 years in prison.
4. According to the Southern District of New York, Storm facilitated illegal transactions worth more than $1 млрд through Tornado Cash, including funds stolen by North Korean Lazarus hackers.
5. Storm has argued that U.S. authorities are applying inconsistent standards. He pointed to trial transcripts saying Chainalysis, the blockchain transaction monitoring company, operated its own Tornado Cash relay node in 2022 and earned fees from transactions passing through it. Chainalysis’ lawyers acknowledged that, but the company has not been prosecuted, Storm said. His point is straightforward: software creators and virtual asset service providers are not being treated under the same rules.

Storm has also said that if he loses, it would end the entire decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. For PSPs, compliance teams, and crypto-facing acquirers, the more immediate takeaway is narrower and more practical: U.S. prosecutors are still willing to test whether code, infrastructure, and transaction flow can be treated as money transmission and sanctions exposure in the same case.