Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of the now-shuttered Bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet, has published an appeal from federal prison asking the Bitcoin community for donations to help cover more than $2 million in accumulated legal debt — after acknowledging that hopes for a presidential pardon have effectively faded.
Rodriguez, 37, is five months into a 60-month sentence at FPC Morgantown, a federal prison camp in West Virginia. In a post published on X on May 6, written in his own name, he described a financial situation that has left him and his wife Lauren with no remaining options.
Daily calls and letters from lawyers demanding payment, combined with ongoing pressure from the Department of Justice to begin making good on a $250,000 court-imposed fine, have made the situation untenable, he wrote.
The Financial Toll Of The Case – Bitcoin Community’s Rol
The legal debt Rodriguez is carrying reflects the scale of a federal case that stretched from his April 2024 arrest through a guilty plea in July 2025 and sentencing in November of the same year.
Rodriguez and co-founder William Lonergan Hill — who received a four-year sentence — pleaded guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, forfeiting approximately $6.37 million in fees earned from Samourai’s operations as part of the judgment, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Rodriguez told journalist and Bitcoin educator Natalie Brunell in December 2025, as reported by CoinDesk, that he accepted the plea after calculating that proceeding to trial carried the risk of significantly longer prison time and millions more in legal costs. The calculation did not spare him the financial consequences of the defense itself.
Pardon Hopes Have Dimmed
In the X post, Rodriguez addressed directly what many in the community had hoped for. President Trump indicated in December 2025 that he would review the case and consider a pardon — a statement that generated brief optimism, particularly given Trump’s earlier pardons of Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. The Bitcoin 2026 conference came and went without action.
“One must come to terms with the fact that I am simply a federal prisoner without money, power, or influence,” Rodriguez wrote in the post, “and I will serve my full sentence.”
A petition supporting a pardon had gathered approximately 15,955 signatures as of May 7, according to Cryip.co. Rodriguez directed donation requests to the Bitcoin address bc1qtjjcvn98wh7dfd55m8kxhjcfexanttwt8gtan8, with private alternatives available through his wife’s X account. At the time of writing, the address provided by Rodriguez shows around $65,000 in donations.
A Case That Redefined Developer Liability
Samourai Wallet served over 100,000 users and processed more than $2 billion in Bitcoin transactions since its 2015 launch, according to the DOJ. Federal prosecutors argued that co-founders Rodriguez and Hill knowingly facilitated criminal activity through the platform’s Whirlpool mixing and Ricochet hopping services, citing court evidence including private communications and public statements made by both men promoting the tools to users seeking to obscure transaction origins.
The case has continued to anchor a broader debate within the Bitcoin and open-source development community over whether builders of non-custodial software tools can face criminal liability for how third parties choose to use their code.
The Cato Institute argued the prosecution risked a chilling effect on privacy advocates, human rights activists, and software developers alike, per earlier reporting. The original Samourai code continues to circulate through the Ashigaru fork, developed by an independent group of contributors following the platform’s shutdown.
Rodriguez himself warned in December 2025 that Bitcoin miners could become the next targets of money transmission enforcement if the legal reasoning applied in the Samourai case is taken to its logical conclusion.
This development marks a significant and troubling moment for the nascent sector — one that will likely continue to shape how developers, lawyers, and regulators think about the line between building financial privacy tools and operating financial infrastructure under US law.
Cover image from Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
