Keonne Rodriguez

Federal — Southern District of New York

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SENTENCE

5 years federal prison (statutory maximum), 3 years supervised release, $250,000 fine, forfeiture of $6,367,139.69 in currency plus samouraiwallet.com domain and Google Play application, forfeiture money judgment of $237,832,360.55

CHARGES

Conspiracy to commit money laundering (dismissed as part of plea) Conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business (pleaded guilty)

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THEIR STORY

Keonne Rodriguez was born around 1988 and grew up to become a software developer with a degree from Oxford. He lived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, with his wife.

In 2015, Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill began building Samourai Wallet, a mobile Bitcoin wallet with privacy-enhancing features. Rodriguez served as CEO and public face. The wallet launched on Google Play in May 2015 and remained available until April 2024 — nearly nine years.

Samourai’s privacy features — Whirlpool (CoinJoin mixing) and Ricochet (transaction hopping) — processed over 80,000 Bitcoin valued at over $2 billion. Prosecutors identified approximately $237 million as criminal proceeds. Fees totaled approximately $4.5 million over nine years.

On April 24, 2024, Rodriguez was arrested in Pennsylvania. Hill was arrested in Lisbon, Portugal. Both were charged with money laundering conspiracy (up to 20 years) and unlicensed money transmission conspiracy (up to 5 years).

Rodriguez fought the charges for over a year before pleading guilty in July 2025 to the transmission count. The laundering charge was dismissed. On November 6, 2025, Judge Denise Cote imposed the statutory maximum of five years, stating she had a “troubling reaction” to Rodriguez’s letter and that he appeared to still be operating “with moral blinders on.”

Rodriguez’s sentence was one year longer than co-defendant Hill’s despite both being convicted of the same offense. The difference appears attributable to Rodriguez’s public statements, which the judge interpreted as lack of remorse.

The Samourai prosecution represents one of the most consequential cases in the debate over whether writing software constitutes a criminal act. Rodriguez did not sell drugs, hack anyone, or steal money. He wrote a Bitcoin wallet application freely available on Google’s app store for nine years. The government’s position — that building a non-custodial privacy tool makes you a criminal — contradicts its own regulatory agency’s guidance and has already driven privacy-focused developers out of the United States.

WHY THEY DESERVE A PARDON

Keonne Rodriguez is a 37-year-old software developer serving the maximum sentence of 5 years in federal prison for building Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet application that never held, controlled, or transmitted a single satoshi of anyone’s money. Rodriguez was the CEO and public face of Samourai — an Oxford-educated developer from Harmony, Pennsylvania, who believed financial privacy was a fundamental right and that writing code to protect it was protected speech. For that belief, he is now in a federal prison cell. Samourai Wallet was non-custodial: users held their own private keys and maintained sole control of their funds. The app was available on Google Play for nearly nine years. Google never removed, flagged, or restricted it. Over 100,000 people downloaded it. The federal government’s own FinCEN had issued guidance in 2019 explicitly stating that non-custodial wallet providers are not money transmitters. When prosecutors asked FinCEN directly whether CoinJoin tools or non-custodial wallets constituted money transmission, FinCEN answered no. Prosecutors charged Rodriguez anyway. His defense accused the government of withholding this exculpatory guidance. Bipartisan Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden wrote to the Attorney General arguing the prosecution “contravenes the well-established interpretation” of FinCEN’s own guidance. Within weeks of Rodriguez’s arrest, Wasabi Wallet blocked U.S. users and Phoenix Wallet withdrew from American app stores. In December 2025, President Trump indicated he would “look at” Rodriguez’s case and potentially issue a pardon. In September 2024, independent developers released Ashigaru — a wallet built from Samourai’s seized code — to ensure the privacy tools Rodriguez built would survive his imprisonment. The code survives. Rodriguez is in a federal prison.