Samourai Wallet Co-Founder ‘Desperately’ Asks for Donations to Cover $2M in Legal Bills

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Samourai Wallet co-founder and developer Keonne Rodriguez tweeted from prison to ask the crypto community to help him pay his legal debts as he’s been “financially wiped out.”

Rodriguez started off by saying that, five months into his prison sentence in the US, he’s no longer hoping for a Presidential pardon. He’s “simply a federal prisoner without money, power, or influence, and I will serve my full sentence,” Rodriguez writes.

Instead, he now owes more than $2 million in legal fees and a $250,000 fine, and invoices keep arriving. He adds:

“Samourai had well over 100,000 users. These users pushed over 2 billion dollars through our open source tools. We need those users and any bitcoiner who appreciates the work that we put into this industry for over a decade to help us now.”

Moreover, Rodriguez says that he’ll likely have to serve the full five years of his sentence. This would prevent him from working and repaying debts.

The developer has quite a few supporters on his side who argue that crypto software developers can’t be legally responsible for third parties’ actions. Also, legal processes of this kind could endanger free speech, individual privacy, and privacy-focused tools.

The code lives on

Samourai Wallet was a privacy-focused, non-custodial Bitcoin wallet. However, it was shuttered in April 2024 after the US brought federal money-laundering charges against its two founders, Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. They claimed that the wallet facilitated over $2 billion in transactions, including over $100 million in laundering from darknet markets.

The two pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in 2025. CEO Rodrigues got five and CTO Hill received a four-year prison sentence.

“For 10 years Bill and I built and published open source code and tools for Bitcoin users,” Rodriguez wrote on Wednesday. “Those same tools and code are what the government says were criminal.”

Meanwhile, being open-source, the tools and code will always exist and be available. But the creators’ “lives have been decimated,” and they’ve been “financially wiped out,” Rodriguez concluded, adding that time is of the essence now.