Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of the now closed Bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet, has published an appeal from a federal prison that asked the Bitcoin community for donations to cover more than $2 million in accumulated legal debt – after acknowledging that hopes for a presidential pardon had effectively faded.
Rodriguez, 37, is five months into a 60-month prison 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 left him and his wife, Lauren, with no other options.
Daily calls and letters from attorneys demanding payment, combined with continued pressure from the Department of Justice to begin fixing the $250,000 court-imposed fine, have made the situation untenable, he wrote.
Financial implications of this case – the role of the Bitcoin community
The legal debt Rodriguez carries reflects the scale of the federal case, which stretched from his arrest in April 2024 through his guilty plea in July 2025 and his sentencing in November of the same year.
Rodriguez and co-founder William Lonergan Hill – who was sentenced to four years in prison – pleaded guilty to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, forfeiting approximately $6.37 million in fees from Samourai’s operations as part of their sentence, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
As CoinDesk reported, Rodriguez told journalist and Bitcoin educator Natalie Brunell in December 2025 that he accepted the plea after calculating that legal proceedings carried the risk of a much longer prison sentence and multimillion-dollar legal costs. The calculation did not spare him the financial consequences of the defense itself.
Sorry, hopes have faded
In X’s post, Rodriguez directly addressed the expectations of many community members. President Trump announced in December 2025 that he would reconsider the case and consider a pardon – an announcement that sparked short-lived optimism, especially given Trump’s previous pardons of Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. The Bitcoin 2026 conference came and went without any action.
“I have to come to terms with the fact that I am simply a federal prisoner with no money, power or influence,” Rodriguez wrote in the post, “and I will serve my full sentence.”
According to Cryip.co, as of May 7, a petition supporting the clemency had gathered approximately 15,955 signatures. Rodriguez directed donation requests to a Bitcoin address bc1qtjjcvn98wh7dfd55m8kxhjcfexanttwt8gtan8with private alternatives available through his wife’s X account. As of this writing, the address provided by Rodriguez shows approximately $65,000 in donations.
A case that redefined the developer’s liability
Samourai Wallet has served more than 100,000 users and processed more than $2 billion in Bitcoin transactions since its launch in 2015, according to the Department of Justice. Federal prosecutors argued that co-founders Rodriguez and Hill knowingly facilitated criminal activity through the platform’s Whirlpool mixing and Ricochet jumping services, citing forensic evidence including private communications and public statements from both men promoting the tools to users seeking to conceal the origins of the transactions.
The case continues to anchor a broader debate in the Bitcoin and open source developer community about whether creators of uncontrolled software tools can face criminal liability for how third parties choose to utilize their code.
The Cato Institute argued that, according to previous reports, the prosecutor’s office could have had a chilling effect on privacy advocates, human rights defenders and software developers. The original Samourai code continues to circulate in a fork of Ashigaru, developed by an independent group of contributors after the platform was shut down.
Rodriguez himself warned in December 2025 that Bitcoin miners could become the next targets of money transmission law enforcement if the legal reasoning used in the Samourai case is taken to its logical conclusion.
BTC's price trends to the upside on the daily chart. Source: BTCUSD on Tradingview
The event marks a significant and troubling moment for the nascent sector – one that will likely continue to shape the way developers, lawyers and regulators think about the line between creating financial privacy tools and operating financial infrastructure under U.S. law.
Cover image from Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
