PriFi.info

Whirlpool

A coinjoin protocol for bitcoin, built by Samourai Wallet in 2019 and stopped by the seizure of its servers in April 2024, that the Ashigaru project has run again from Samourai's code since June 2025.

LiveCoinjoin

Samourai Wallet's coordinator stopped with the seizure of its servers on 24 April 2024; the Ashigaru Open Source Project announced its own Whirlpool coordinator on 23 June 2025. Its coordinator, downloads and code are reached over Tor, so whether it was running on 23 October 2026 could not be checked from this site.

Launched
Jun 2019
Token
None
Chains
Bitcoin

Checked on 23 Oct 2026. Information only, not investment advice.

How it works

Whirlpool is a coinjoin protocol for bitcoin. A coinjoin is a single transaction that combines coins from several users, and in a Whirlpool coinjoin every output has exactly the same amount, the denomination of the pool, and there is no change output, so an observer cannot tell which output belongs to which input. Samourai Wallet's developers released it in public beta in June 2019 as an implementation of ZeroLink, a design for coinjoins with a coordinator first published by Adam Ficsor in August 2017. According to the Ashigaru project, the protocol was designed by TDevD and ZeroLeak of Samourai and LaurentMT of OXT. Samourai ran the only coordinator, the server that organises each round, until US authorities seized Samourai's servers on 24 April 2024. On 23 June 2025 the Ashigaru Open Source Project announced Ashigaru Whirlpool, a coordinator it describes as an implementation of Samourai Wallet's Whirlpool, built after forking Samourai's code base.

Whirlpool's main change to ZeroLink is a premix transaction, Tx0. Instead of bringing an odd-sized coin into a coinjoin and taking the remainder back out as an unmixed change output, the user's wallet first splits the coin in Tx0 into outputs of the pool's size, pays the coordinator's fee and moves the leftover change aside, so the coinjoin itself produces no change. On Ashigaru's coordinator there are two pools, of 0.25 BTC and 0.025 BTC; the fee is fixed at 5% of the pool size, 0.0125 BTC or 0.00125 BTC per Tx0, which the project calls an anti-Sybil fee; one Tx0 can create at most 20 premix outputs; and each becomes eligible for its first mix after one confirmation. Each mix then combines new entrants with coins that are remixing from earlier mixes, and a coin can keep remixing. Ashigaru gives the anonymity set of a first mix as at least 5 coins, or up to 10 when a surge cycle is triggered.

The coordinator should not learn which output belongs to which input. Clients register their inputs and then their output addresses separately, using Chaumian blind signatures, a scheme in which the coordinator signs an output address without seeing it, so that it can later check the signature without linking the two. Ashigaru Whirlpool works only over Tor, with Tor identity isolation so that session identifiers cannot link input registration to the output reveal, and its coordinator does not send clients the RSA keys used for the blinding, to stop it giving each participant a unique key that could link inputs to outputs. The coordinator does keep a database of every Tx0 ID and the transaction IDs of coins eligible to remix, and it holds only the public keys for receiving the fee, with the private keys kept elsewhere. It accepts only single-signature native SegWit (bc1q) addresses and refuses multisig addresses as mix destinations.

Users took part through Samourai Wallet on Android, a desktop client and a command-line client from 2019, and through Sparrow Wallet from version 1.5.0 in September 2021 until Sparrow removed its Whirlpool client the day after the seizure. On Ashigaru, mixing runs in Ashigaru Terminal, a desktop application forked from Sparrow Wallet and released with the coordinator, while the Ashigaru mobile wallet and Sparrow can spend mixed coins. Ashigaru does not accept coins left in Samourai's pools as remixers, because it cannot verify them, so they have to enter through a new Tx0. A wallet also needs a server to look up its coins: Ashigaru's apps connect to a Dojo, a backend server that users can run on their own node, and Samourai also ran a hosted Dojo for its users. According to Ashigaru, that hosted Dojo server was seized in 2024 together with the public keys of user wallets.

Coinjoin volume over time

No daily history for Whirlpool is held on this site. Whirlpool holds no deposits, so it has no TVL, and no free public source of daily figures for the number or value of its coinjoins was found when this profile was checked on 23 Oct 2026. What public data can show is set out on its card in the Bitcoin privacy section of Protocols.

What it hides and what it does not

What it hides

  • Which output of a mix belongs to which input: every output has the same amount and there is no change, so the transaction itself gives no link between them.
  • From the coordinator, which input registered which output address: outputs are registered with Chaumian blind signatures, and on Ashigaru over a separate Tor identity.

What it does not hide

  • That a coin entered Whirlpool and where it came from: the premix transaction, Tx0, spends the user's own coin, pays the coordinator's fee and is recognisable on chain, as are the mixes with their equal outputs.
  • The leftover change from Tx0, which stays linked to the original coin and is kept apart from mixed coins.
  • To the operator of the wallet's backend server, the wallet's coins: Samourai's hosted Dojo server, seized in 2024, held the public keys of user wallets, according to Ashigaru.
  • To Ashigaru's coordinator, every Tx0 and the transactions of the coins eligible to remix, which it keeps in a database.
  • Small mixes: a first mix on Ashigaru's coordinator has an anonymity set of 5 coins, or up to 10 in a surge cycle.

Drawn from how it works, above; the sources are listed at the end of the page. Where privacy still leaks explains the patterns, such as timing and amounts, that can give users of any design away.

Audits

None found when this profile was checked on 23 Oct 2026.

Incidents

Five incidents, oldest first: flaws, exploits, sanctions, prosecutions and other events that affected the project or its users.

  1. Prosecution

    US prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment charging Samourai Wallet's chief executive Keonne Rodriguez and chief technology officer William Lonergan Hill with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, alleging over USD 2 billion in unlawful transactions and more than USD 100 million in money laundering transactions. Rodriguez was arrested in the US and Hill in Portugal; Samourai's web servers and the samourai.io domain were seized with the help of authorities in Iceland, and a seizure warrant served on the Google Play Store made the app unavailable in the US. Samourai ran the only Whirlpool coordinator, and Sparrow Wallet removed its Whirlpool client the next day.

    Sources: Founders And CEO Of Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Arrested And Charged With Money Laundering And Unlicensed Money Transmitting Offenses US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 24 Apr 2024; Sparrow 1.9.0 release ('Remove Whirlpool client, and other Soroban related features and dependencies') GitHub, sparrowwallet, 25 Apr 2024

  2. Among the servers seized was Samourai's hosted Dojo, the backend that Samourai Wallet users who did not run their own node relied on to look up their coins; according to the Ashigaru project's announcement of June 2025, it was seized together with the public keys of user wallets, which can reveal a wallet's addresses and transactions to whoever holds them. Ashigaru also said it would not accept coins left in Samourai's pools as remixers, because it could not verify them.

    Sources: Announcement: new Zerolink coinjoin coordinator Ashigaru Open Source Project, 23 Jun 2025; Founders And CEO Of Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Arrested And Charged With Money Laundering And Unlicensed Money Transmitting Offenses US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 24 Apr 2024

  3. Yuval Kogman, a co-author of the WabiSabi paper, wrote to the bitcoindev mailing list that a malicious Whirlpool coordinator could carry out a trivial deanonymisation attack, because clients fully trusted the server's blind signing key: by giving each input its own RSA key, the server could link outputs to inputs. He concluded that such software should not be used unless users trust the coordinators with their privacy, and wrote in April 2025 that, as far as he knew, no Whirlpool coordinator was operating. Ashigaru's coordinator of June 2025 says it does not send clients the RSA keys used in the blinding, to avoid giving each participant a unique key that could link inputs to outputs.

    Sources: Reiterating centralized coinjoin (Wasabi & Samourai) deanonymization attacks bitcoindev mailing list (Google Groups), 21 Dec 2024; Re: Reiterating centralized coinjoin (Wasabi & Samourai) deanonymization attacks bitcoindev mailing list (mirror by b10c), 9 Apr 2025; Announcement: new Zerolink coinjoin coordinator Ashigaru Open Source Project, 23 Jun 2025

  4. Prosecution

    Rodriguez and Hill pleaded guilty before US District Judge Denise L. Cote to conspiring to operate a money transmitting business that transmitted criminal proceeds; the release announcing the pleas, issued on 6 August 2025, says Samourai facilitated more than USD 200 million in unlawful transactions.

    Source: Founders Of Samourai Wallet Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Plead Guilty US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 6 Aug 2025

  5. Prosecution

    Judge Cote sentenced Rodriguez to five years in prison on 6 November 2025 and Hill to four years on 19 November 2025, each with three years of supervised release and a USD 250,000 fine. The sentencing release says more than 80,000 BTC, over USD 2 billion at the time, passed through Ricochet, launched in 2017, and Whirlpool, from 2019; that over USD 237 million of criminal proceeds were laundered through Samourai; and that the two paid USD 6,367,139.69 in forfeiture, representing Samourai's fees. No clemency for either founder appeared on the Justice Department's list of clemency grants, updated on 20 October 2026, when it was checked on 23 October 2026.

    Sources: Founders Of Samourai Wallet Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Sentenced To Five And Four Years In Prison US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, 19 Nov 2025; Clemency grants by President Donald J. Trump (2025 to present) US Department of Justice, Office of the Pardon Attorney, 20 Oct 2026; Samourai Co-Founder Claims Biden-Era Lawfare in Calling for Trump Pardon Cointelegraph, 19 Dec 2025

Milestones

Six milestones, oldest first.

  1. ZeroLink, a framework for coinjoins run by a coordinator, was published by Adam Ficsor with support from TDev; Whirlpool later implemented it with one major change, the premix transaction.

    Source: Coinjoin (topic page) Bitcoin Optech

  2. Samourai released Whirlpool in public beta, with a desktop client for Windows, macOS and Linux, a command-line client and libraries, and support in the Android wallet still in development. Bitcoin Magazine reported the beta on 24 June 2019; Bitcoin Optech dates the launch to 25 June 2019.

    Sources: Samourai Wallet's Privacy-Enhancing Whirlpool Now in Public Beta Bitcoin Magazine, 24 Jun 2019; Coinjoin (topic page) Bitcoin Optech

  3. Sparrow Wallet 1.5.0 added mixing through 'Samourai Whirlpool coinjoin integration', on mainnet and testnet, bringing Whirlpool to a second desktop wallet.

    Source: Sparrow 1.5.0 release GitHub, sparrowwallet, 23 Sep 2021

  4. The day after the seizure of Samourai's servers, Sparrow Wallet 1.9.0 removed its Whirlpool client and other features that relied on Samourai's Soroban messaging.

    Source: Sparrow 1.9.0 release GitHub, sparrowwallet, 25 Apr 2024

  5. The Ashigaru Open Source Project released its Android wallet, version 1.0.0, and on the same day announced online collaborative transactions (Cahoots) and a new PayNym directory; version 1.1.0 followed on 12 December 2024.

    Source: Ashigaru news (list of posts) Ashigaru, 23 Oct 2026

  6. Ashigaru announced Ashigaru Whirlpool, a Tor-only coordinator built from Samourai's code, with pools of 0.25 BTC and 0.025 BTC and a fixed fee of 5% of the pool size, and released Ashigaru Terminal 1.0.0, a desktop client forked from Sparrow Wallet, to mix with it. Its news page listed no later post when checked on 23 October 2026.

    Sources: Announcement: new Zerolink coinjoin coordinator Ashigaru Open Source Project, 23 Jun 2025; Ashigaru news (list of posts) Ashigaru, 23 Oct 2026; Download (Ashigaru Terminal v1.0.0 of 23 June 2025 and Ashigaru Mobile v1.1.1 of 3 March 2025) Ashigaru, 23 Oct 2026

Funding

One source of funding. Amounts are in US dollars; a dash means the sources give no US dollar figure.

DateRoundAmountInvestors

First outside investment in Katana Cryptographic, the company that maintained Samourai Wallet: $100,000, in a currency the reports do not state, for development, customer service and quality assurance; the terms were not disclosed

Sources: Cypherpunk Holdings invests in Samourai Wallet The Block, 3 Jun 2019; Samourai Wallet Secures First Investment of $100,000 Bitcoin Magazine, 5 Jun 2019

 – Cypherpunk Holdings

Risks

Whirlpool depends on a single coordinator run by one operator. Samourai's was seized in April 2024, and the coordinator that replaced it is run by a team that names no members, calls itself newly established and works only over Tor; it keeps a central database of every Tx0 and of the coins eligible to remix, which it says it hopes to decentralise. No independent security audit of Whirlpool or of Ashigaru's version was found, and Ashigaru's statement that its mixes break all deterministic links with 100% entropy is the project's own claim. Yuval Kogman wrote in 2024 that a malicious coordinator could link outputs to inputs by giving each client its own blinding key; Ashigaru says its coordinator no longer sends clients these keys, which is likewise its own statement. Privacy depends on how many people use the pools, and no public figures for Ashigaru's pools were found: mixes are small, with an anonymity set of 5 to 10 coins in a first mix, so repeated remixing and careful spending matter, and spending a mixed coin together with the change from Tx0 links it back to the original coin. A wallet that looks up its coins through someone else's server exposes them to that server's operator: Samourai's hosted Dojo was seized with the public keys of user wallets, which can reveal those wallets' addresses and history. Legal exposure remains: Samourai's founders were convicted in the United States in 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business that carried criminal proceeds, and Ashigaru's coordinator, like Samourai's, charges a fee for each Tx0.

Sources

The documents this profile rests on. Each audit, incident, milestone and funding round above also links its own sources.

Checked on 23 Oct 2026. Confidence: confirmed. Information only, not investment, legal or tax advice.

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