Tornado Cash Co-founder Roman Storm Claims Chainalysis Operated Mixing Relay Nodes
Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm cited public court records stating that blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis operated Tornado Cash relay nodes in 2022 and charged fees on withdrawals processed through those nodes. He pointed out that the same company assisted prosecutors in tracking what they termed criminal transactions, while he faces ongoing criminal litigation for his involvement in developing the software.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla postponed the retrial on August 25 to April 26, 2027, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for April 20. A motion for a judgment of acquittal (Rule 29) submitted in September 2025 remains undecided. In August 2025, a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business, while charges of money laundering and sanctions violations remain unresolved. Prosecutors plan to retry the unresolved charges, which could add up to a maximum of 40 additional years; they had sought to start the trial in October 2026, but the defense requested a 90-day delay until after the ruling on the acquittal motion, which the court granted.
Court records show that Chainalysis lawyers admitted in a motion to quash a subpoena that the company "operated relay nodes for a period in 2022"; the defense subpoena requested relay materials from March to August 2022. In court on July 25, 2025, prosecutors stated that both parties agreed that "Chainalysis relays earned fees," while also claiming "there is no evidence that the defendant knew Chainalysis was running relays." The defense claimed that relay fees accumulated to tens of thousands of dollars, and that internal discussions were not solely for law enforcement purposes. The relay fee for a withdrawal of 100 ETH was approximately 0.4 ETH. From September 2020 to August 2022, about 99% of withdrawals went through relays.
After the defense subpoenaed Chainalysis personnel, the company sought to quash the subpoena with the prosecution's support. Records indicate that a Chainalysis witness planned to invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to testify; the defense claimed that prosecutors spoke with the company's lawyer the night before and learned about it afterward. The jury did not hear details about the relay operations. Prosecutors stated that the relays were independent third parties and that the founders did not share in the relay fees. After April 2022, the interface had called on Chainalysis's sanctions oracle to filter deposit addresses.
Storm was arrested at his home in Seattle in August 2023. Co-founder Alexey Pertsev has been convicted in the Netherlands, while Roman Semenov is at large. The U.S. Treasury Department designated Tornado Cash as a Specially Designated National in August 2022. Prosecutors allege that the service facilitated over $1 billion in illegal fund flows, including approximately $625 million in stolen funds related to North Korea's Ronin Bridge.
In market mechanisms, this represents a clash between law enforcement narratives and infrastructure roles. The buyers are the prosecutors aiming to convict open-source developers and the analytics firms wanting to maintain the credibility of their tracking products; the sellers are the same market that defends relay fees as independent third parties. Funds have flowed from mixing users to relay operators, including analytics firms that later testified for the government. Beneficiaries are the suppliers holding on-chain tracking contracts; the pressured parties are developers who write smart contracts but do not run relays yet are accused of operating transmission businesses. The event-driven nature is clear: after the retrial was postponed, the relay fees acknowledged in court have been brought back to the forefront.
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The Storm case ties "writing code" and "operating money transmission" together. The jury only reached a guilty verdict on unlicensed transmission, with money laundering and sanctions stuck, indicating that twelve individuals could not distinguish between protocol authors and relay operators. The prosecution's theory is that interfaces, routing, and relay registries constitute controllable services; the defense's theory is that once a smart contract is live, relays are third parties that anyone can run. Chainalysis itself ran nodes and charged fees, turning the latter from an abstract defense into a named competitor.
The capital path is dual-track. Chainalysis sells the government an analysis product that "can see mixing coin exits" while also taking a cut as a relay from the same exit in 2022. Storm maintains the interface through Peppersec, paying Infura and Alchemy bills, while not taking relay fees. After the sanctions list was implemented, the interface integrated Chainalysis's oracle to filter addresses, effectively embedding a competitor's compliance product into the service being prosecuted. Money flows on both sides of the analysis contracts and relay fees, with criminal liability resting solely on the developers.
A comparable case is that Bitcoin core developers have never been charged with operating transmission for miners packaging mixing transactions, and the responsibility split between Tor node operators and browser authors. The Netherlands first convicted Pertsev, and the U.S. is now using Storm as a common law sample. The current stage is "conviction not completed, precedent not set"—with the retrial dragged to 2027, the acquittal motion pending, and the boundaries of developer liability still determined by unresolved motions.
Structural judgment belongs to regulatory changes. The mechanism is: mixing coins are treated as money service providers, making who "accepts and transmits value" the axis of conviction; relays are closer to transmission than writing contracts, and analytics firms act as both relays and prosecution experts. The emergence of the Fifth Amendment indicates that the same infrastructure can switch identities in the eyes of the prosecution. Software authors are prosecuted as operators, while the nodes that actually handle gas fees and cuts can remain silent. This is not a technical dispute; it is about who is allowed to charge on-chain and who must serve time for the protocol itself.