Samourai Wallet Founder Writes From Prison Asking | Crypto News
Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of the now-shuttered Bitcoin privateness pockets Samourai Wallet, has revealed an appeal from federal prison asking the Bitcoin neighborhood for donations to help cowl more than $2 million in amassed legal debt — after acknowledging that hopes for a presidential pardon have successfully pale.
Rodriguez, 37, is 5 months into a 60-month sentence at FPC Morgantown, a federal prison camp in West Virginia. In a post revealed on X on May 6, written in his own identify, he described a financial scenario that has left him and his spouse Lauren with no remaining choices.
Daily calls and letters from attorneys demanding fee, mixed with ongoing strain from the Department of Justice to start making good on a $250,000 court-imposed nice, have made the scenario untenable, he wrote.
The Financial Toll Of The Case – Bitcoin Community’s Rol
The legal debt Rodriguez is carrying displays the dimensions of a federal case that stretched from his April 2024 arrest through a guilty plea in July 2025 and sentencing in November of the same 12 months.
Rodriguez and co-founder William Lonergan Hill — who obtained a four-year sentence — pleaded guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, forfeiting roughly $6.37 million in charges earned from Samourai’s operations as half of the judgment, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Rodriguez told journalist and Bitcoin educator Natalie Brunell in December 2025, as reported by CoinDesk, that he accepted the plea after calculating that continuing to trial carried the risk of considerably longer prison time and tens of millions more in legal prices. The calculation didn’t spare him the financial penalties of the protection itself.
Pardon Hopes Have Dimmed
In the X post, Rodriguez addressed immediately what many in the neighborhood had hoped for. President Trump indicated in December 2025 that he would review the case and contemplate a pardon — a assertion that generated transient optimism, notably given Trump’s earlier pardons of Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. The Bitcoin 2026 convention got here and went without motion.
“One must come to terms with the fact that I am simply a federal prisoner without money, power, or influence,” Rodriguez wrote in the post, “and I will serve my full sentence.”
A petition supporting a pardon had gathered roughly 15,955 signatures as of May 7, according to Cryip.co. Rodriguez directed donation requests to the Bitcoin tackle bc1qtjjcvn98wh7dfd55m8kxhjcfexanttwt8gtan8, with personal alternate options accessible through his spouse’s X account. At the time of writing, the tackle offered by Rodriguez reveals around $65,000 in donations.
A Case That Redefined Developer Liability
Samourai Wallet served over 100,000 customers and processed more than $2 billion in Bitcoin transactions since its 2015 launch, according to the DOJ. Federal prosecutors argued that co-founders Rodriguez and Hill knowingly facilitated felony exercise through the platform’s Whirlpool mixing and Ricochet hopping companies, citing court evidence including personal communications and public statements made by both males selling the instruments to customers in search of to obscure transaction origins.
The case has continued to anchor a broader debate within the Bitcoin and open-source development neighborhood over whether or not builders of non-custodial software program instruments can face felony legal responsibility for how third events select to use their code.
The Cato Institute argued the prosecution risked a chilling impact on privateness advocates, human rights activists, and software program builders alike, per earlier reporting. The unique Samourai code continues to flow into through the Ashigaru fork, developed by an unbiased group of contributors following the platform’s shutdown.
Rodriguez himself warned in December 2025 that Bitcoin miners may turn into the next targets of money transmission enforcement if the legal reasoning utilized in the Samourai case is taken to its logical conclusion.
This development marks a important and troubling second for the nascent sector — one that will seemingly continue to form how builders, attorneys, and regulators assume about the road between building financial privateness instruments and working financial infrastructure under US law.
Cover image from Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
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