TechFlow News, March 10: According to a report by Decrypt, U.S. federal prosecutors have filed a motion with a Manhattan judge seeking a retrial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on two conspiracy charges on which the jury failed to reach a verdict in August last year. The Department of Justice has proposed holding the retrial on either October 5 or October 12, with each conspiracy charge carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years—up to 40 years in total.
In August last year, a Manhattan jury convicted Storm of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business but deadlocked on two more serious conspiracy charges. In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury added Tornado Cash to its sanctions list, accusing the protocol of laundering $7 billion since 2019—including funds linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. That sanction was later ruled unlawful by an appellate court and lifted.
Notably, in a report submitted to Congress this Monday, the Treasury Department acknowledged that “legitimate users may utilize mixers to achieve financial privacy.”
