Bitcoin

Keonne Rodriguez on Bitcoin, Privacy, and Going to Prison

"We thought we were on the right side of the law," the Samourai Wallet co-founder tells Reason.

Zach Weissmueller | From the May 2026 issue

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He's Serving 5 Years in Prison for Bitcoin Privacy Software

Forty-eight hours before he was scheduled to report to federal prison, Keonne Rodriguez was still talking about code.

In 2015, Rodriguez launched Samourai Wallet, a bitcoin wallet designed for financial privacy. Its signature feature, called Whirlpool, allowed users to combine their bitcoin with others', obscuring the trail of who paid whom. "I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold," Rodriguez told Reason in 2022. "You take your bitcoin, you add it into Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece."

Federal prosecutors saw something very different. According to the Department of Justice, Whirlpool was a money laundering machine. When prosecutors filed charges against Rodriguez and his co-founder, William Hill, they argued that the app was "specifically intended to conceal the nature of illicit transactions," knowingly transmitting more than $237 million tied to drug trafficking, darknet marketplaces, muder-for-hire schemes, and a child pornography website, among others. But just as selling someone a kitchen knife isn't a crime, building software capable of moving money doesn't automatically make its creators responsible for how others use it.

Prosecutors also charged that Samourai Wallet operated as an unlicensed money transmitting business—that it acted like PayPal, Venmo, or Western Union but failed to register with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Yet the software never took custody of users' bitcoin, and FinCEN told DOJ prosecutors in official correspondence this meant Samourai Wallet wasn't a money-transmitting business.

Rodriguez ultimately pleaded guilty in July 2025 to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, a charge that carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Hill faces a four-year sentence. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote imposed the maximum penalty allowed under Rodriguez's plea agreement, describing his conduct as "very serious, anti-social criminal behavior."

Rodriguez's case has grave implications for the future of privacy software. If publishing code that protects anonymity can land someone in prison, developers may start thinking twice before releasing tools the government finds inconvenient.

In this conversation with Reason's Zach Weissmueller, recorded in December just two days before Rodriguez was set to go to prison, Rodriguez explains why he built Samourai Wallet, how he views the government's allegations, and why he chose to plead guilty despite insisting he broke no law.

Reason: You launched Samourai Wallet about 10 years ago. What is it, and why did you create it?

Rodriguez: Samourai Wallet is what we would call a noncustodial bitcoin wallet. Noncustodial only means that the user of the wallet or the software is the one that maintains total complete control of their private keys or of their bitcoin as opposed to custodial, which is like a relationship that you have with your bank. You walk into the bank, you give them $100, that $100 is yours, but the bank is the one who's holding it for you. We built a noncustodial open-source piece of software, a bitcoin wallet named Samourai Wallet.

I got involved in bitcoin in 2012. I got involved because I saw bitcoin as a digital analog to physical cash, a type of censorship-resistant currency where there was no third party between you and what you were trying to transact with or to. By 2015, the culture in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general started to shift. It started to be more about an investment or an asset, a way to make a lot of money. And that's really not why I was here or my partner Bill was here. So instead of leaving the space or going to a different coin, we said, let's build the software that we want to see. Let's build the software that makes bitcoin what we believe it can be. If you have a censorship-resistant form of currency, you really need to have privacy built in.

What most people don't understand about bitcoin is that it's actually very transparent. There isn't privacy built into the protocol of bitcoin. If you have a web browser, you can log onto a website and see every single transaction that's ever occurred, and it's there permanently forever. That's not a great aspect of censorship resistance. So we needed to build software that could increase the privacy proposition for users so that bitcoin could live up to its potential of censorship resistance.

The way most people buy bitcoin is they go to an exchange like Coinbase, connect their bank account, buy bitcoin using that account, and then they can spend it, hold onto it, or transact with other people. There's this digital trail—a public ledger that ultimately can be traced back to a real-life person who used the bank account to get bitcoin. How did Samourai Wallet disrupt that flow or make it less easy to trace?

The way I like to describe to a lay person the type of privacy proposition that Samourai provided, again, imagine you walk to an ATM at your bank and you withdraw $100 out of the ATM. The bank knows you had $100 and the bank knows that you took out $100 in cash from the ATM, but the bank doesn't know what you do with that $100 after. They don't know where you spend it or where you send it to, and frankly, it's none of their business. What Samourai Wallet did was create that same level of financial privacy.

So they go to an exchange, they buy $100 worth of bitcoin from Coinbase. Coinbase knows who they are. Coinbase knows where they sent the $100 worth of bitcoin to, but once they use Samourai Wallet, Coinbase could no longer see what........

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