The court sentenced Keonne Rodriguez to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for operating a Whirlpool cryptocurrency mixer for money laundering.
Samourai Wallet Co-Founder Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for Running Cryptocurrency Mixing Service
On November 7, the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Federal Court sentenced Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of Samourai Wallet, to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
OK - now at Samourai Wallet crypto mixer dissolution of Keonne Rodriguez, he pled guilty, SDNY voices ask for the 5 year max https://t.co/6C9EXPoGB2 Inner City Press will live tweet (with an eye on Peraire-Bueno jury deliberations 7 floor down), thread below https://t.co/xBM6HPtaOP
— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) November 6, 2025
According to the indictment, Rodriguez and co-founder and CTO William Lonergan Hill developed the Samourai wallet with two cryptocurrency mixers, Whirlpool and Ricochet. These services would take a user's funds from the original wallet, mix them with other users' funds, creating a messy flow of funds, and finally withdraw the funds to a new wallet to hide the transaction information.
Prosecutors claim that the two not only built a platform for money laundering but also actively promoted it on X, encouraging users to “launder” cryptocurrencies obtained from illegal activities.
"U-turn" admitting wrongdoing
- As Coin68 reported, in April 2024, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an arrest warrant for the two founders of Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, for money laundering. The government then also shut down the Samourai Wallet website and the project's application was also removed from Google Play in the US.
- Initially, both denied the allegations and claimed that Samourai Wallet was just a legitimate privacy tool for Bitcoin users. However, by July 2025, Rodriguez and Hill changed their stance and entered guilty pleas, paving the way for the November verdict.
- At the trial, Rodriguez expressed remorse and pledged not to break the law again, while his defense attorney tried to soften the sentence by describing him as a devoted father who lived simply in a $250,000 house in Pennsylvania, in stark contrast to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the former CEO of FTX who lived in a lavish penthouse in the Bahamas and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for financial fraud.
- According to the US Department of Justice, Whirlpool allowed users to “mix” multiple Bitcoin transactions to obscure the origin and destination of assets, making it difficult for authorities to trace. This feature was used to launder millions of dollars from criminal activities, including drug trafficking and online fraud.
- The Samourai Wallet case is XEM as one of the strongest legal moves by the US against cryptocurrency mixing services, which have come under close scrutiny following a series of similar cases.
Legal storm with crypto mixing projects
- Last August 2025, Roman Storm, the developer of the Tornado Cash mixer, was also found guilty of illegal money transmission, although the jury failed to reach a consensus on charges of money laundering and sanctions violations.
- Meanwhile, the crypto community has raised a legal support fund for Storm and Tornado Cash co-founder Alexey Pertsev, arguing that open-source tools cannot be prosecuted like financial crimes.
- While Rodriguez begins serving his sentence, the remaining co-founder, William Lonergan Hill, will be sentenced on November 19. Currently, the Samourai Wallet website and app have stopped working, while the US Department of Justice continues to seize user data and trace transactions through Whirlpool to serve the investigation.
- The case of Samourai Wallet is XEM as a stern warning from US authorities: providing transaction security services is not prohibited, but if the tool is designed or promoted to avoid anti-money laundering (AML) laws, developers can be prosecuted criminally.
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