Federal prosecutors are asking a New York judge to impose a maximum five-year prison term on Samourai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. The US government claims that both of them knowingly built and promoted a crypto mixing service used by criminals to wash hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits.
The sentencing memorandum, filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, describes the pair as “not mere bystanders.” Prosecutors say they “repeatedly invited and encouraged criminals” to use Samourai’s tools to conceal digital funds. Between 2015 and April 2024, when authorities shut down the platform, investigators traced at least $237 million in criminal proceeds through the wallet.
According to the filing, Samourai’s key features, Whirlpool and Ricochet, were designed to mask blockchain trails and lure users seeking to hide transactions. Investigators claim that those functions drew money from drug traffickers, darknet vendors, and hackers. They also tied the wallet to murder-for-hire schemes and a child pornography site.
Messages quoted in court papers paint a troubling picture. In 2018, Rodriguez reportedly called crypto mixing ‘money laundering for bitcoin.’ Hill, prosecutors say, promoted Samourai on dark web forums in 2020 and again in 2023, advertising it as a tool for ‘cleaning dirty Bitcoin.’
The government says both men profited from the activity. Samourai collected about 246.3 BTC in fees—roughly $6.3 million at the time. With Bitcoin’s appreciation, that sum now equals about $26.9 million.
Defense filings tell a different story. Hill said he built the project to support Bitcoin’s use as digital cash, not as a means for laundering. He claimed that he had reviewed FinCEN guidance and sought legal advice before launch, believing Samourai did not need a money transmitter license because it never held customer assets. He also admitted regret for some of the firm’s marketing language.
Rodriguez was in full agreement with the above statements. He mentioned that tracing the stolen Bitcoin of the victims through the OXT analytics platform was part of his activity. The prosecution held the opposite opinion, claiming that both men encouraged unlawful users to join their side, despite being fully aware of the purposes for which their technology was being used.
Rodriguez is facing sentencing this week and is scheduled to appear in court on November 6 at 11:00 a.m. ET. Hill's hearing will take place on the following day. Three weighty charges - money laundering conspiracy, sanctions violations, and licensing offenses - were all dropped earlier through plea bargaining, which helped avoid a potential prison term of several decades.
The case had a wider impact across the entire crypto industry. It came to light just two weeks after the President of the United States granted a pardon to CZ, the founder of Binance, who had already served four months in prison due to anti-money laundering shortcomings. L0la L33tz, the reporter who broke the story of the government’s memo in The Rage, characterized its language as unexpectedly severe considering the counts that had been dropped.
The Samourai prosecution mirrors the recent Tornado Cash case. Developer Roman Storm was convicted in August 2025 of operating an unlicensed money transmitter, though jurors deadlocked on laundering and sanctions charges. The Treasury once stated that Tornado Cash handled $7 billion in tainted cryptocurrency before its 2022 sanctions, which were later ruled unlawful and subsequently lifted.
With both prosecutions advancing, a larger question lingers: can developing open-source privacy code itself be considered a crime?
The Samourai Wallet case marks a critical moment in crypto regulation, testing the extent to which accountability extends for privacy-focused developers. As sentencing approaches, the outcome could shape future rules around Bitcoin privacy, open-source innovation, and the legal limits of crypto mixing platforms.