The SDNY Wants to Retry Roman Storm for Writing Code

The Southern District of New York has filed a letter requesting a retrial date for Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, targeting October 2026. The prosecutors want to retry him on two counts that a jury of his peers couldn't unanimously decide on: money laundering conspiracy and sanctions evasion conspiracy. Each count carries up to 20 years. That's 40 years in a federal cage for writing open-source software.

Let that sink in. Twelve jurors heard four weeks of evidence and deadlocked. No verdict on money laundering. No verdict on sanctions violations. The only conviction was for operating an unlicensed money service business, and Storm has filed a Rule 29 motion to get that acquitted on legal grounds. The court will rule on that next month. But instead of accepting the jury's inability to convict, the government wants to run it back.

The contradictions are staggering. President Trump declared the "War on Crypto is over." The DOJ issued a memo stating it "is not a digital assets regulator" and won't target mixers for end-user actions. The Treasury Department lifted Tornado Cash sanctions entirely. And yet the same DOJ, through the SDNY, is pressing forward to imprison a developer who wrote code for a protocol he doesn't control, for transactions he never touched.

This is the same office that handled the Samourai Wallet case, which landed two developers in prison for building privacy-preserving tools. The SDNY has become a rogue operation within the federal government, pursuing its own agenda on financial privacy regardless of what the White House, Treasury, or DOJ leadership say. If code is speech, and the First Amendment means anything in the digital age, the persecution of Roman Storm is one of the most consequential civil liberties cases of our time.

Storm has essentially exhausted his legal defense funds after the first trial. He has a daughter and a life in Seattle that the government is trying to destroy because he wrote software that gives people financial privacy. If you believe that writing open-source code shouldn't land you in prison, this is the fight that matters.

The Treasury Wants to Bring the Patriot Act to Digital Assets

Why it matters: The "win for privacy" headline is cover for expanded surveillance infrastructure.

A recent Treasury report to Congress under the GENIUS Act has been widely mischaracterized as an endorsement of privacy tools. Yes, the report acknowledges that "lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy when transacting through public blockchains." But if you read beyond the headline, the Treasury is recommending that Congress add a sixth special measure to Section 311 of the Patriot Act to authorize Treasury to "prohibit, or impose conditions upon, certain transmittals of funds" in digital assets. They want to create digital asset-specific financial institution types subject to AML/CFT obligations. They want to incentivize "digital identity tools" and have third-party service providers conduct identity verifications. They want Congress to specify which DeFi actors should have surveillance obligations. The ability to use a mixer means nothing when every on-ramp, off-ramp, and intermediary is required to KYC you and report your activity. The privacy is an illusion inside a surveillance cage.

Iran War Breaks Asian Supply Chains: Formosa Petrochemical Issues Force Majeure

Why it matters: Second-order war effects are hitting the real economy faster than markets expected.

Taiwan's Formosa Petrochemical Corp has issued a force majeure notice on some of its petrochemical supplies due to feedstock delivery delays from shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Formosa is one of Asia's largest petrochemical producers. Their products are feedstock for plastics, synthetic materials, and packaging that flow through supply chains serving electronics, automotive, construction, and consumer goods across the region. This is not an isolated event. Several Asian refineries and petrochemical firms have already been forced to cut runs as the U.S.-Israel war on Iran disrupts crude and feedstock exports from the Middle East. When people debate the cost of war, they rarely think past the missiles. The fragility of global supply chains means that a conflict in the Persian Gulf raises the cost of everything from car dashboards to food packaging in Southeast Asia. These are the externalities that never make it into the war calculus.

First New-Design Nuclear Reactor Approved in 52 Years

Why it matters: Nuclear energy is the best candidate for baseload power, and Bitcoin miners will be buyers of first resort.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a construction permit for TerraPower's Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming. This is the first construction permit ever issued by the NRC for a commercial non-light-water power reactor, and the first time in 52 years the commission has approved a reactor based on core coolant technology invented after 1960. The Natrium is a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt energy storage system that can boost output to 500 megawatts. It's being built on the site of an existing coal plant, a transition that should become the model nationwide. Nuclear energy and Bitcoin mining have a symbiotic future. Nuclear plants need a buyer of first resort for their electricity while transmission infrastructure and grid interconnects are built out. Bitcoin miners are the perfect interruptible load, an immediate, location-agnostic customer that monetizes energy from day one. This permit is a bullish signal in a very chaotic time.

The Case Against Payments Blockchains

Why it matters: Bitcoin's UTXO model is architecturally superior for programmable payments.

Ark Labs published a thorough breakdown of why building payments infrastructure on account-model blockchains like Solana and Ethereum is architecturally flawed. The core argument: Bitcoin's UTXOs are discrete units of value with spending conditions attached, making them programmable bearer instruments. An escrow, a conditional hold, an agent budget with daily limits, these can all be encoded directly into the money itself. Account-model chains store balances in a shared global ledger where every transaction competes for processing with every other operation on the network. As Ark Labs CEO Marco Argentieri points out, Stripe now wants to simultaneously be your payment processor and run the blockchain your settlement depends on through Tempo. That's a platform bet, not neutral infrastructure. Bitcoin is the only settlement network without a CEO. Stablecoins don't need another blockchain. They need the one that already won.

Bitcoin Optech #395: VTXO Verification and Expanded Miner Nonce Space

Why it matters: Protocol development keeps grinding, quietly solving real problems.

Last week's Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #395 covered two notable developments. First, V-PACK, a proposed standard for stateless VTXO verification in the Ark ecosystem. The goal is to let lightweight devices, including hardware wallets, independently verify and audit off-chain state and maintain backup data for unilateral exit. This is critical infrastructure for Ark's scaling approach: if users can't independently verify their off-chain balances, the trust model breaks down. Second, Matt Corallo posted a draft BIP to expand the miner-usable nonce space in the block header's nVersion field from 16 to 24 bits. Mining ASICs have been rolling nTime bits for extra nonce space, which distorts block timestamps. Expanding the nVersion nonce space is a cleaner solution that simplifies ASIC design without the timestamp side effects. Additionally, Antoine Poinsot shared preliminary work integrating the OP_TEMPLATEHASH soft fork proposal into miniscript and PSBTs, pushing forward the tooling needed for more expressive Bitcoin scripting.

Oil Chaos:  to  in 18 Hours as Treasury Steps In

Why it matters: The price crash doesn't match the supply fundamentals, and markets are starting to ask why.

Brent crude spiked above /barrel over the weekend as the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed. Ship traffic through the passage has nearly halted, with only 2-3 tankers crossing daily instead of the usual 30-35. Iraq has cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day, Kuwait by 300k b/d, and the UAE is following suit, all because they're running out of storage capacity with nowhere to ship. Then, within hours, crude crashed over 30% to below . The catalyst? Trump declared the war "over" and the US military began clearing the Strait. But here's the part that doesn't add up: refineries across Iran, Iraq, and neighboring states have been hit by airstrikes. You can't rebuild a refinery in a weekend. The physical supply disruption is real and ongoing.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said late last week that Treasury would do what it can to keep oil prices from spiraling. He issued a temporary 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil "already on the water" and announced billion in government maritime reinsurance for Gulf shipping. The combination of explicit statements about price suppression and an overnight 30% crash has many speculating that Treasury intervened directly in futures markets. The price you see on a screen may not reflect the actual supply-demand dynamics of a market where 20 million barrels per day of transit capacity just got shut down. As one account noted: crude went from  to  in a single session. That's not a market clearing. That's an intervention.

TS Lombard: The Coming Inflation Shock

Why it matters: Even a "mild" energy shock adds 1.5-2 percentage points to inflation and kills all rate cut hopes.

TS Lombard's Dario Perkins published a detailed sensitivity analysis on the inflation impact of the Iran-driven energy shock. With oil up roughly 50% and European natural gas up 60-90%, the passthrough to CPI is around 20-40% of the commodity price move. At current levels, that's manageable. But if oil hits (/barrel and European gas prices spike 120-150%, the inflationary hit becomes 1.5 to 2 percentage points across developed markets. That would mean year six of "transitory" inflation. Perkins notes that central banks already planning to hold rates will stick to that plan, but every central bank that was planning to cut has now shelved those plans entirely. ING is hosting an emergency webinar today titled "Central Banks, Energy Prices, and the Rate Hike Dilemma." The question is no longer when rate cuts resume. It's whether rate hikes are coming back. China's CPI just hit a 37-month high at 1.3%. The deflation narrative is dead. And the oil price shock hasn't even hit March data yet.