During the 2024 Presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump courted libertarians and the crypto community in his successful bid for his second US presidency. In a famous speech at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, he promised that, “America will once again be a nation that protects property rights, privacy, freedom of transaction, freedom of association, and freedom of speech.”
Trump also earned a big ovation when he pledged “to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.” Ross Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road—a successful darknet market that accepted Bitcoin for payments and allowed anonymous trade to bolster economic freedom. For this “crime,” he was sentenced to double life in prison plus 40 years without parole. After more than a decade behind bars, President Trump granted Ross a full and unconditional pardon on January 21, 2025, stating that “the scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
Moreover, in coherence with Trump’s promises, in April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche released a memo where he wrote that “the Department [of Justice] will no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations.” Unfortunately, the Ross pardon and the Blanche memo were just a flash in the pan, as Trump’s DoJ continues the Biden-era policy of regulation by government overreach and prosecution, especially against crypto developers who devote themselves to building privacy-preserving tools.
The Prosecution of Samourai Wallet Developers
Last year, the Mises Wire reported on the arrest of Samourai Wallet (SW) developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. SW offers protections to Bitcoin users who want to transact privately on the Bitcoin blockchain—where sender, receiver, and amount of information is available for everyone to see. Rodriguez and Hill are accused of conspiracy to commit money laundering and of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The two developers pleaded guilty to unlicensed money transmission on July 30, 2025, despite reaffirming their innocence just one week before; in exchange, the prosecution promised to drop money laundering charges, which could have cost them up to 25 years in prison, while the maximum time behind bars for unlicensed money transmission is 5 years.
The prosecution against Rodriguez and Hill sets a dangerous precedent. SW is just software that users have full control of, without any possibility for developers to interfere with their decisions. Given that it is a non-custodial wallet, the Samourai team never takes custody of the funds, which means that Rodriguez and Hill cannot control users’ coins, let alone launder or transmit them. Users, not developers, do all the work: holding developers responsible for users’ actions is a bit like criminalizing the Ford CEO because drivers break traffic laws.
Shockingly, prosecutors were told in August 2023 by two Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN) employees that, “Because Samourai does not take ‘custody’ of the cryptocurrency by possessing the private keys to any addresses where the cryptocurrency is stored, that would strongly suggest that Samourai is not acting as an MSB [money service business].”
Government attorneys were forced to disclose this information as late as April 2025, but this did not stop them from pursuing decades in prison for Rodriguez and Hill and from publicly contradicting the FinCEN guidance. Prosecutors were also shameless in using tweets (yes, tweets!) as “evidence” for their criminal intent. For example, the Samourai team tweeted that everyone can download SW, even Iranian or Russian citizens. Needless to say, this is true even now, given that Samourai is an open source software and that nobody, not even omnipotent government attorneys, can prevent people around the world from downloading software. Still, tweeting obvious truths is deemed as criminal intent by the US government.
Prosecutors also complained that SW is designed to protect users’ privacy and that it does not force them to provide Know Your Customers (KYC) information to developers, willfully ignoring the fact that a cryptocurrency wallet is not a fiat bank. The arrogance of government employees who demand that developers write code that pleases them and not users cannot be overstated. Given the imbalance of power at play, it is not surprising that Rodriguez and Hill chose the lesser evil by pleading guilty to the minor charge in order to avoid decades in prison.
The Prosecution of Tornado Cash Developers
Tornado Cash (TC) is a crypto mixer, developed mainly for the Ethereum blockchain. Its purpose is to break the link between users’ real-world identity and their on-chain activity. The Journal of Libertarian Studies covered the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions against TC smart contracts and the indictment of TC developers Roman Storm and Roman Semenov. The criminal prosecution of Storm started in August 2023, with the DoJ charging him with conspiracy to commit money laundering, to evade sanctions, and to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The trial began in July 2025. On August 6, the jury found Storm guilty of unlicensed money transmission but was deadlocked on the other two counts. His defense will probably appeal the single conviction decision.
The prosecution against Storm sets a dangerous precedent, like the one against Rodriguez and Hill. First, it is remarkable that the jury could not find an agreement on sanction evasion and money laundering charges, showing that there is at least a reasonable doubt about software developers’ responsibility for users’ actions. Second, as Coincenter points out with regard to the money transmission count, it has been very difficult to understand
…which part of the US code create[s] obligations and carry criminal penalties[.] Is it (a) the criminal law sections of the U.S. Code (USC), (b) the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) sections of the USC, (c) the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) sections of the USC, (d) the implementing regulations for the Bank Secrecy Act in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), (e) the implementing regulations of IEEPA, and/or (f) the guidance documents from either the BSA regulator, FinCEN, or the sanctions regulator, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC)?
In the end, the Storm money transmission conviction depended more on the legal interpretation offered by the court than by jury fact-finding. Additionally, the DoJ wrote a press release to celebrate its success in the prosecution against Rodriguez and Hill the same day the Storm jury trial ended. Notably, the DoJ claims that SW allowed criminals to “launder millions of dollars of dirty money” even if Rodriguez and Hill pleaded guilty to operating a money transmission business and not to money laundering charges, which the DoJ promised to drop. That this sloppy statement was released the same day of the jury decision in the Storm trial shows once again that the arrogance of the DoJ knows no boundaries. Needless to say, no actual criminal was caught as a result of the prosecution of SW and TC developers.
There Cannot be Freedom Without Privacy
The SW and TC cases entail remarkable consequences, not only for software developers and the crypto industry, but also for the defense of freedom in contemporary society. A few days after Storm was convicted, an Ethereum developer was arrested in Turkey because of his academic research on TC, showing that the US policy against crypto privacy tools does not stop at the US border.
On August 13, Google Play Store updated its policy to require crypto wallet developers to register as money transmission businesses before publishing their software, only to clarify a few hours later that the new policy does not apply to non-custodial wallets. On August 14, US Treasury Secretary Bessent said that the US Bitcoin reserve will be constituted exclusively of confiscated (stolen) assets. This is strikingly reminiscent of the way the US gold reserve was “acquired” during and after the Franklin Roosevelt presidency.
Many libertarians voted for Trump because of his crypto-friendly approach and his promises to defend privacy and property rights. However, the reality is that Trump’s DOJ is wasting taxpayers’ money prosecuting developers whose only fault is to write code the government does not like. Instead of favoring sound money and financial privacy, Trump loves pumping and dumping crypto ETFs, memecoins, and other paper assets. A true crypto-friendly President would do the exact opposite. Libertarians should be wary of supporting a President who makes empty promises and whose actual policy is to bolster financial surveillance, regulation by prosecution, and government overreach.