The US government can still try Tornado Cash, novel Storm on money laundering and violation of sanctions due to a suspended jury, according to lawyers.
“The Ministry of Justice (DoJ) will decide in the coming days if it wants to try these accusations in a new trial,” wrote Jake Chervinsky, legal director of the venture capital company Variant Fund, on X.
On Wednesday, Storm was sentenced for a crime chief for his involvement with Tornado Cash. The jury found him guilty of conspiracy to operate a company of transmission of money without license.
However, the members of the jury did not return a unanimous verdict on the accusations of conspiracy in order to commit money laundering and a conspiracy to violate the sanctions in North Korea.
Lawyer Aaron Brogan told Cintelegraph that Storm’s verdict still has a wider legal implication for decentralized protocols.
“The problem with this large application of the federal law on the monetary transmitter is that, frankly, a lot of concern for concern that they could apply as much to them as a torade in cash. And although the government would probably not bring charges against everything, the large exposure gives them a powerful stick in any negotiation. ”
The potential of the lasting implications of the case attracted the attention of the cryptographic industry and the defenders of privacy. Lawyers claim that the precedent implementation test is essential for digital confidentiality and could have a significant impact on open source software developers in the United States.
In relation: The peirce of the dry defends the confidentiality of the transaction while the tornado in cash is looming
Lawyers react to the partial verdict
The United States can always bring Roman Storm before the courts on the unresolved accusations of conspiracy in order to commit money laundering and a plot to rape the sanctions in North Korea. The decision would depend on several factors, including the probability of obtaining a conviction during a second trial.
“If the Trump administration wants the United States to be the world capital of cryptography, then the DoJ should not be authorized to try the two accusations in the dead end,” said Dearvinsky.
Chervinsky described the partial verdict as “a sad day for deffi”, warning that article 1960 under the American code, which the prosecutors used to invoice in Storm the functioning of a company of transmission of money without license, represents an existential threat for decentralized finance applications.
“Overall, this leads to a fairly depressing conclusion,” wrote lawyer Zack Shapiro on X, but said it was good that “draconian” prison terms for money laundering accusations were out of tables for the moment.
I think it is reasonable to conclude that the government may not try again the money laundering chiefs.
An American court canceled the tornado cash sanctions in January 2025, offering decentralized protocols of cryptography and private life a major legal victory.
The sanctions were imposed by the American office for the control of foreign assets (OFAC) in 2022, accusing the mixture of silver money laundering.
Doj officials said that Tornado’s cash protocol helped whiten more than $ 7 billion in crypto between 2019 and 2022 and contributed to the north-Korean money laundering pirates in hacking.
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