The docket's next obligation is expert disclosures on February 5, 2027, with a final conference on April 20 [9]. That first date falls about 23 weeks after Tuesday's order [4], and Judge Katherine Polk Failla excluded the intervening months from the Speedy Trial clock [9]. The case the industry treats as its test of developer liability will therefore produce nothing on the record for most of a year, unless the acquittal motion is decided first [3].
When a second jury does sit, it will decide two conspiracy counts on one defendant's facts [10], and a district jury verdict is authority for nobody else. The count carrying the doctrine is the one already returned, conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business [10], and that becomes reviewable only after sentencing. Storm has not been sentenced [12], roughly a year after the verdict [8]. April 26, 2027 sits about 20 months past the conviction [5] and eight months past the order that set it [7]. The appellate ruling that would tell anyone what the statute means starts its own clock only after that.
Storm's read is that the government is "setting an example" rather than resolving anything, and that "SDNY won't stop" after a jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts [13]. He points to a February 2024 New York City Bar Association event, now filed as an exhibit on his docket, at which Tara La Morte, chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said her office wanted the industry to take notice and named the Tornado Cash prosecution as an example of bringing the sector into compliance [16]. "I honestly don't know when this ends," he wrote Tuesday [15]. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Vitalik Buterin, who backed Storm in January and called himself an active user of tools Storm developed, are attached to the case [22]; what they are waiting on has moved again.
What accumulates in the meantime is not law. The Samourai Wallet founders pleaded guilty to the same money transmitting conspiracy and drew five and four years in November 2025 [20], which disposes of two defendants and decides no question. President Trump told Decrypt in December he would look at a pardon for Keonne Rodriguez, who began serving days later [21]; that would be relief for one man, not a rule for the next developer. Alexey Pertsev's 64-month Dutch conviction is on appeal in a different legal system, with $1.25 million pledged by the Ethereum Foundation toward his defence [19].
The evidentiary fight Storm wants also runs on the new calendar. He says the trial record shows Chainalysis operated its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees on transactions flowing through it, and that after his lawyers subpoenaed the firm its witness pleaded the fifth, so the jury heard none of it [17]. Decrypt says it has asked Chainalysis for comment [17]. If that argument goes anywhere, it goes there in the spring of 2027.
