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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 4
  • Research debt items: 3

Samourai Wallet

Summary

Samourai Wallet is documented in OIR from U.S. government announcements about the criminal prosecution of its co-founders. Prosecutors described Samourai as a cryptocurrency mixer that facilitated large volumes of illegal transactions; the co-founders pled guilty in 2025 and received prison sentences. This page records the system as a privacy-tech pressure point and does not treat prosecutorial feature descriptions as independent technical specifications.

Verified Facts

  • IRS-CI announced that Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez (CEO) and William Lonergan Hill (CTO) pled guilty on July 30, 2025, in S.D.N.Y. to conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business knowing the business transmitted crime proceeds.1
  • The plea announcement describes Samourai as a cryptocurrency mixer that facilitated more than $200 million in illegal transactions.1
  • The sentencing announcement states Rodriguez and Hill actively promoted Samourai to criminal users, including Hill marketing on a darknet forum and Rodriguez encouraging hackers on Twitter to send proceeds into Samourai’s Whirlpool.2
  • Rodriguez was sentenced to five years and Hill to four years in November 2025.2
  • See United States v. Rodriguez (Samourai Wallet).1

Historical Context

Samourai sits in the same OIR cluster as Tornado Cash and other financial-privacy tools facing money-transmission, sanctions, or laundering theories aimed at developers and operators. Government announcements are the current primary sources for OIR’s system description; independent technical documentation remains research debt.

Technical Analysis

Assumptions: Feature names such as Whirlpool appear in government charging narratives. OIR does not yet cite Samourai’s own technical docs for architecture claims. Treat mixer/privacy-tool characterizations as prosecutorial descriptions unless corroborated by primary software documentation.

Relationships

  • TECH-SAMOURAI-WALLET cites SRC-IRS-SAMOURAI-PLEA-2025.
  • TECH-SAMOURAI-WALLET related_to CASE-US-V-RODRIGUEZ.
  • TECH-SAMOURAI-WALLET related_to TOPIC-DEVELOPER-SOFTWARE-LIABILITY.
  • TECH-SAMOURAI-WALLET related_to TECH-TORNADO-CASH.

Sources

  1. SRC-IRS-SAMOURAI-PLEA-2025: IRS-CI — Samourai Wallet Founders Plead Guilty (July 30, 2025).
  2. SRC-IRS-SAMOURAI-SENTENCE-2025: IRS-CI — Samourai Wallet Founders Sentenced (Nov. 2025).

Research Debt

  • Add Samourai technical documentation or archived project pages describing Whirlpool/Ricochet.
  • Add indictment PDF and plea agreement text via the related case page’s research debt.
  • Distinguish custodial vs non-custodial mixer theories with primary legal filings.

Document metadata

  • Last verified: 2026-08-08

  1. SRC-IRS-SAMOURAI-PLEA-2025 — IRS-CI Samourai Wallet Founders Plead Guilty (July 30, 2025). Official government announcement. ↩↩↩

  2. SRC-IRS-SAMOURAI-SENTENCE-2025 — IRS-CI Samourai Wallet Founders Sentenced (Nov. 2025). Official government announcement. ↩↩