Samourai Wallet
Privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet with transaction mixing features.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
* | N/A | - | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Samourai Wallet is a mobile Bitcoin wallet for Android designed to enhance user privacy and transaction anonymity. It was developed starting around 2015 by co-founders Keonne Rodriguez, who served as CEO, and William Lonergan Hill, the Chief Technology Officer. The wallet was built on principles of financial privacy, security, and decentralization, offering features intended to mask the user's identity and obscure transaction trails.
Key services included "Whirlpool," a CoinJoin implementation that mixed multiple users' transactions to obfuscate their origins, and "Ricochet," which added extra hops to a transaction's path. Additional features included military-grade AES-256 encryption, secure PIN login, TOR and VPN support for IP address anonymization, and no address reuse to prevent linking transactions to a single identity. The wallet also offered advanced functionalities like batch spending to save on fees, offline mode, and the ability to connect to a user's own full Bitcoin node for enhanced privacy. The business generated revenue by charging fees for its privacy services, which amounted to approximately $4.5 million.
In April 2024, Rodriguez and Hill were arrested and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. Prosecutors alleged that from 2015 to February 2024, the wallet operated as an unlicensed money transmitter and facilitated over $2 billion in unlawful transactions, including laundering over $100 million in proceeds from criminal sources like the dark web markets Silk Road and Hydra Market. Following the arrests, the wallet's web servers and domain were seized, and its mobile application was removed from the Google Play Store in the United States.
On July 30, 2025, both founders pleaded guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. As part of a plea agreement, the more severe charge of money laundering was dropped, and the potential prison sentence was capped at five years. Sentencing was scheduled for November 6, 2025.
Keywords: Bitcoin wallet, cryptocurrency privacy, transaction mixer, CoinJoin, Whirlpool, crypto anonymity, mobile wallet, financial privacy, non-custodial wallet, Keonne Rodriguez, William Lonergan Hill, money laundering, unlicensed money transmitter, Ricochet, SegWit, TOR support, Android wallet, crypto regulation, DOJ, cryptocurrency crime