On August 6, 2025, Roman Storm, one of founders of cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, was convicted by a New York federal jury of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. However, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the two more serious charges involving U.S. money laundering and sanctions violations. According to the verdict form, the jury was deadlocked on Count 1, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and Count 3, conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”).
Storm, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in August 23, 2023 on the day that the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment in the Southern District of New York that charged Storm and a second Tornado Cash cofounder, Roman Semenov, for allegedly operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and failing to implement anti-money laundering (“AML”) controls despite having knowledge that the platform was being used for unlawful purposes. On the same day, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Semenov, a Russian citizen, for promoting Tornado Cash services and increasing the anonymity of those services after learning that the Lazarus Group, an OFAC-designated North Korean hacking group, had used the platform to launder large volumes of stolen virtual currency. OFAC reported, at the time, that a third Tornado Cash cofounder, Alexey Pertsev, had been arrested in the Netherlands in August 2022 on related money laundering charges. Since then, multiple media outlets have reported that Pertsev was found guilty of money laundering and was allegedly in the process of appealing his conviction from prison. The DOJ’s case against Semenov continues.
Storm’s conviction comes just months after U.S. Department of the Treasury removed economic sanctions against Tornado Cash on March 21, 2025. Tornado Cash – described as an open source, non-custodial, fully decentralized virtual currency mixer comprised of self-executing computer code known as “smart contracts” – was sanctioned by the United States in 2022 after investigators determined that the platform was used to launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency in 2019, including $455 million in virtual currency stolen by the Lazarus Group in 2022 that was considered to be the largest virtual currency heist at the time. The sanctions were removed following a November 2024 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned the U.S. sanctions against Tornado Cash that had been imposed under the IEEPA. According to the Fifth Circuit, the Department of Treasury had exceeded its legal authority when it sanctioned Tornado Cash after finding, among other things, that the platform’s immutable smart contracts were not considered “property” under the IEEPA.
Verdict| Indictment | U.S. Department of Treasury Press Release – August 23, 2023 | U.S. Department of Treasury Press Release – March 21, 2025 | Fifth Circuit Decision