A letter filed Monday points Judge Katherine Polk Failla to the D.C. Circuit's September 25 decision affirming Roman Sterlingov's Bitcoin Fog convictions, where venue in Washington rested on an undercover agent's transactions. Storm's acquittal motion has been pending since argument in April.
Federal prosecutors have asked the judge weighing Roman Storm's acquittal motion to treat a recent appeals court decision as settling the venue question in their favor. In a letter filed Monday they cited the D.C. Circuit's September 25 ruling in the Bitcoin Fog case as supplemental authority for trying the Tornado Cash developer in Manhattan.
Storm was convicted in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, a count carrying a five-year statutory maximum, after the jury deadlocked on money laundering and sanctions conspiracy charges. His motion for acquittal, filed in September 2025 and argued in April, is still undecided before Judge Katherine Polk Failla in the Southern District of New York. A retrial on the deadlocked counts is set for April 26, 2027.
Venue is doing real work in this case. The government has to prove that some part of the offense happened in the district where it brought the charges, and the Tornado Cash code ran on Ethereum rather than in any particular place. Prosecutors point to Shakeeb Ahmed, who testified that he used Tornado Cash from his apartment in Manhattan, and argue that deposits like his enlarged the pool of funds that made tracing harder, according to CryptoSlate's account of the letter.
The decision they are leaning on is United States v. Sterlingov, No. 24-3161, decided September 25 by Circuit Judges Millett, Pillard and Wilkins. The panel affirmed Roman Sterlingov's conviction on all four counts and his 150-month sentence. On the money laundering counts it found venue proper in Washington because an undercover FBI agent transacted with Bitcoin Fog from his office there, noting that "a trial may be held where any part of a crime can be proved to have been done." On the unlicensed money transmitting counts it held that "the jury reasonably could have found that Bitcoin Fog served customers in D.C."
Prosecutors argue that reasoning "directly supports" New York venue on the money laundering and unlicensed money transmission conspiracy charges, Cointelegraph reported. Storm's position, set out in his 2025 motion, is that Ahmed's use of the tool in Manhattan did not further the conspiracy the government charged and so cannot anchor venue there.
The two records differ in a way the letter's logic has to carry. In Sterlingov the District of Columbia activity was a government agent's own transactions with a service the defendant was found to have operated, and the agent deposited about $250 in bitcoin and withdrew nearly all of it the next day, Decrypt reported. Here the Manhattan activity is a witness's testimony about his own use of a tool, and Storm has argued throughout that the case punishes him for writing code rather than for running a service for customers. None of the reports read for this article says how prosecutors addressed that difference.
The letter itself was not available for this article. The court's docket could not be opened, so its contents are described here only as those three reports describe them, and they do not agree on every detail: two give the filing date as Monday, October 5, while a third labels the same filing with a date that falls on a Wednesday.
The timing sits awkwardly against the rest of the government's week. FinCEN withdrew its proposed crypto mixing rule and its unhosted wallet rule on October 5, the same day the letter was filed, citing a chilling effect on legitimate activity. Storm pointed to the contrast publicly, Cointelegraph reported, saying the Justice Department is still pursuing him with everything it has. An administrative withdrawal repeals no criminal statute and changes nothing about the counts he faces, as CryptoSlate noted.
Prosecutions over Tornado Cash have run on both sides of the Atlantic. A Dutch court ordered developer Alexey Pertsev imprisoned in 2024, and in November that year Vitalik Buterin sent $1 million to Coin Center hours after a Tornado Cash court victory.
Failla has not ruled, more than a year after the verdict and six months after argument. The venue question reaches the count Storm already stands convicted of, not only the counts waiting for a jury in 2027, which is why the motion still matters whatever happens at the retrial.
