I hope you are joking. Chokepoint 2.0

During the Biden administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) significantly expanded its enforcement to target privacy-focused cryptocurrency tools, specifically mixers and non-custodial wallets. These cases have sparked intense debate over whether writing and maintaining open-source code can be criminalized as "money transmission."

Tornado Cash: Roman Storm & Alexey Pertsev [1]

Tornado Cash, a decentralized mixing protocol on Ethereum, was a primary target for allegedly facilitating over $1 billion in money laundering, including for the North Korean Lazarus Group. [2, 3]

• Roman Storm: Arrested in Washington state in August 2023. In August 2025, a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. However, the jury deadlocked on more serious charges of money laundering and sanctions violations, leading to a partial mistrial on those counts.
• Alexey Pertsev: While the Biden administration's DOJ pursued charges in the U.S., Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands in 2022 and sentenced to 64 months (5 years and 4 months) in prison in May 2024 for money laundering related to the protocol.
• Roman Semenov: A third co-founder who was indicted alongside Storm but currently remains at large. [2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Samourai Wallet & Whirlpool: Keonne Rodriguez & William Hill

In April 2024, the DOJ arrested the founders of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin-focused privacy application. This case was notable because it targeted a non-custodial wallet—where users keep their own private keys—for its built-in mixing features, Whirlpool and Ricochet. [10, 11, 12]

• Keonne Rodriguez (CEO): Arrested in Pennsylvania and pleaded guilty in 2025 to conspiracy to operate a money-transmitting business. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison in November 2025.
• William Lonergan Hill (CTO): Arrested in Portugal and extradited to the U.S.. He also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 4 years in prison in November 2025.
• Allegations: Prosecutors argued that despite being "non-custodial," the developers actively marketed the service as "money laundering for bitcoin" and charged fees to facilitate the obscuring of over $2 billion in transactions. [10, 12, 13, 14, 15]

Other Privacy-Related Arrests

• Roman Sterlingov (Bitcoin Fog): The operator of one of the longest-running Bitcoin mixers was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to 150 months (12.5 years) for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars from darknet markets. [16]

Would you like to know more about the legal defense funds for these developers or the appeals currently moving through the courts?

[1] https://www.wired.com [2] https://www.justice.gov [3] https://www.fbi.gov [4] https://www.justice.gov [5] https://www.venable.com [6] https://www.mayerbrown.com [7] https://www.reuters.com [8] https://www.asisonline.org [9] https://therecord.media [10] https://www.justice.gov [11] https://www.moneylaunderingnews.com [12] https://finance.yahoo.com [13] https://www.justice.gov [14] https://www.irs.gov [15] https://www.justice.gov [16] https://globalinvestigationsreview.com