Roman Storm, a co-founder and developer of Tornado Cash, will not face trial for charges related to money laundering and violations of sanctions until April 2025. During a telephone conference on November 1, Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York announced that Storm’s trial has been postponed to April 14, 2025. His legal team has been advocating for the dismissal of the charges, arguing that they stem solely from his involvement in coding for the cryptocurrency mixing service.
In 2023, both Storm and fellow co-founder Roman Semenov were indicted on multiple charges, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to violate sanctions, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The indictment sparked significant backlash within the cryptocurrency community.
The charges against Storm and Semenov came in the wake of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) placing Tornado Cash on its Specially Designated Nationals list in August 2022. The Treasury Department accused the mixing service of “repeatedly failing to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors.”
As of the time of this report, Semenov remained at large and was listed among the FBI’s most wanted individuals. Storm, meanwhile, has been released on a $2 million bond since his arrest in 2023 and has pleaded not guilty to all allegations.
In a related case, Alexey Pertsev, another co-founder of Tornado Cash, was arrested in the Netherlands in 2022 on charges of money laundering. He was convicted in May 2024 and subsequently sentenced to over five years in prison.