Samourai Wallet was shut down on 24 April 2024 when its founders were arrested and its servers and domain were seized. Nobody seized user keys. Coins sit on chain, controlled by your 12 words plus the passphrase, and a Samourai wallet restores in Sparrow or Electrum using documented derivation paths.
Listen to this article, about 14 minutes. A synthetic voice reads the article and announces each section title as it begins; tables are read row by row and the questions at the end are left out.
Recorded 3 October 2026 from the article as published that day. Press a chapter to jump there; the highlighted line is what is playing. A play button sits beside every section heading, and once you scroll past this player a bar at the bottom of the screen keeps the controls in reach. Tap or click any sentence to hear the reading start from there.
On this page: the five Samourai derivation paths taken from the wallet’s own recovery guide and checked against the source code of Sparrow and Electrum on 3 October 2026, the one account Sparrow does not define, the four reasons a restored wallet reads zero, and four dated accounts from people who went through the recovery.
Think you already know this? Five questions, one minute.
Every answer is on this page. Answer from what you know now; the page fills in the rest.
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1. Prosecutors seized a great deal when Samourai was shut down in April 2024. Which of these was taken?
The Justice Department’s arrest release describes the seizure of the web servers and the samourai.io domain in coordination with authorities in Iceland, and a seizure warrant for the Android app served on the Google Play Store. The $6,367,139.69 later forfeited was the fee revenue of the business, not customer coins. Read the section
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2. Ashigaru forked the abandoned Samourai codebase. What does it say it holds of Samourai users’ wallets?
Ashigaru’s Whirlpool announcement of 23 June 2025 states that the project does not possess the private keys of Samourai’s wallets and will not integrate the old liquidity pools. Nobody inherited anything, which is the point of a non custodial wallet: the words on your backup are the whole of your claim. Read the section
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3. Which derivation path does Samourai’s own recovery guide give for the Post Mix account?
Samourai’s Restore and Recovery guide, still published in the project’s Android repository, lists Post Mix at m/84’/0’/2147483646′. The path ending 2147483644 is Bad Bank, the toxic change account, and m/49’/0’/0′ is a nested segwit deposit account. Read the section
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4. A Samourai seed restores cleanly in another wallet and shows a zero balance with no history. What does the documentation point to first?
Samourai used the wallet passphrase as the BIP39 passphrase, so the 12 words alone derive a valid but different and usually empty wallet, with no error to tell you. An issue filed on the project’s own tracker on 19 January 2019 describes exactly that behaviour and is still open. Read the section
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5. The official domain samourai.io was seized and no longer resolves. What is samourai-wallet.io?
The domain the Justice Department’s release names as seized is samourai.io, and it did not resolve when checked on 3 October 2026. The other domain is a different site that publishes recovery walkthroughs under the Samourai name with no named operator. Never type a recovery phrase into a web page, and never install wallet software from a source you cannot identify. Read the section
Checked on 3 October 2026 against the Justice Department’s press releases, the wallet’s own recovery documentation, which is still published, and the source code of the two desktop wallets that read its accounts. The pages ranking for this search are either news reports of the case or commission earning wallet round ups, and neither carries the five derivation paths, which is the only part of this story that moves money.
What actually happened to Samourai Wallet?
A federal prosecution that ended the project. The indictment was unsealed on Wednesday 24 April 2024 in the Southern District of New York, charging Keonne Rodriguez, the chief executive, and William Lonergan Hill, the chief technology officer, with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. Rodriguez was arrested that morning in the Western District of Pennsylvania and Hill was arrested in Portugal.
The same release describes what was taken off the internet: the web servers and the domain samourai.io, seized in coordination with authorities in Iceland, and a seizure warrant for the Android app served on the Google Play Store. Prosecutors put over $2 billion of unlawful transactions through the service and more than 80,000 bitcoin through its two features, Ricochet from 2017 and Whirlpool from 2019.
Both men pleaded guilty on 30 July 2025 before United States District Judge Denise L. Cote, to one count of conspiracy to operate a money transmitting business knowing it transmitted crime proceeds, and agreed to forfeit $237,832,360.55. The sentencing release records five years for Rodriguez and four years for Hill, three years of supervised release each, a $250,000 fine each, and $6,367,139.69 paid in forfeiture representing the fees the service had earned.
That forfeiture figure frightens people who held coins there, so be precise about it: it is the fee revenue of the business. There was no pot of customer bitcoin to take.
Are your coins gone if they were in Samourai Wallet?
No, and the reason is structural rather than lucky. Samourai never held keys, which is what a non custodial wallet means in practice: the app generated your words on your phone and signed with them there. A seizure can take servers, a domain and a listing in an app store. None of those things can move a coin.
The clearest statement of that comes from an unexpected direction. Ashigaru, the fork that picked up the abandoned codebase, says in its own Whirlpool announcement of 23 June 2025 that it does not possess the private keys of Samourai’s wallets and will not integrate the old liquidity pools. Nobody inherited anything. Your words are the whole of your claim to the coins, which is the deal a recovery phrase always was.
What did stop is the software. The app read its balance and history from Samourai’s backend, so phones that still have it installed show zero or never finish loading. A balance of zero in a dead app is a symptom of a switched off server, not a statement about the blockchain.
Which derivation paths does a Samourai wallet need?
Five, and they are published by the wallet itself. Samourai’s Restore and Recovery guide is still live in the project’s Android repository and lists them at the top, which is the single most useful artefact left of the project. The table below pairs each one with how the two desktop wallets that read them actually treat it, taken from their own code on 3 October 2026.
| Samourai account | Derivation path | Script type | How Sparrow and Electrum handle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deposit, the main account | m/44’ or m/49’ or m/84’ or m/47’ / 0’ / 0’ | Legacy, nested segwit or native segwit | Standard account. Both wallets find it by scanning, if the script type matches |
| Bad Bank, toxic change | m/84’/0’/2147483644’ | Native segwit | Named account in both. Electrum calls it Samourai Bad Bank |
| Pre Mix | m/84’/0’/2147483645’ | Native segwit | Named account in both |
| Post Mix | m/84’/0’/2147483646’ | Native segwit | Named account in both. Sparrow’s code gives it double the usual address lookahead |
| Ricochet | m/44’ or m/49’ or m/84’ / 0’ / 2147483647’ | Three variants, one per script type | Electrum lists all three. Sparrow defines no Ricochet account, so it has to be added by hand |
That last row is the one worth slowing down for, and it is where the recovery guides that rank for this search are wrong by omission. Sparrow’s Add Account menu offers Whirlpool accounts, and the enum that defines them contains exactly three: Premix at 2147483645, Postmix at 2147483646 and Badbank at 2147483644, all P2WPKH. Ricochet is not in it. Electrum’s wallet format list, by contrast, carries Samourai Ricochet three times, as legacy on m/44’, nested segwit on m/49’ and native segwit on m/84’. If you ever used Ricochet, a tidy import into Sparrow can look complete while one account is simply not being looked at.
Why does a restored Samourai wallet show a zero balance?
Usually because one of three inputs is wrong, and none of the three announces itself. The restore succeeds, a wallet appears, and it is the wrong wallet.
The passphrase first. Samourai asked for a passphrase when you created the wallet and used it as the BIP39 passphrase, so the 12 words alone derive a different, empty wallet. There is no error message for this, by design: an issue filed on the project’s own tracker on 19 January 2019 and still open describes exactly that behaviour, a wallet recovered from a wrong passphrase with nothing in it and no warning. Whitespace and capitalisation count. One character out is a different wallet.
Then the script type. The deposit account exists on three paths and the one you need is the one matching the addresses you actually received to: addresses starting with 1 are legacy, with 3 are nested segwit, with bc1 are native segwit. Foundation’s migration guide of 25 April 2024 tells people to try each script type in turn for this reason.
Then the address gap. Wallets stop scanning after a run of unused addresses, and Sparrow’s FAQ puts that limit at 20 by default and 40 for a postmix account, a figure its code reaches from the other side by setting the postmix lookahead to twice the default. Anybody who remixed heavily has addresses far beyond index 40, so a deep postmix account can report a balance that is simply incomplete until the gap limit is raised.
| What you see | Most likely cause | The documented check |
|---|---|---|
| Wallet restores, balance zero, no history | Passphrase missing or mistyped | Re-enter with the passphrase field ticked, exactly as created, spaces included |
| Some transactions appear, others missing | Wrong script type for the addresses you used | Try legacy, nested segwit and native segwit in turn on the deposit path |
| Deposit account right, mixed coins missing | Whirlpool accounts not added, or Ricochet not supported by the wallet | Add premix, postmix and bad bank; add Ricochet manually where the wallet has no entry for it |
| Postmix balance looks too low | Address gap limit too small for the number of remixes | Raise the gap limit on that account past the default of 40 |
| Checksum error while typing the words | A mistyped or wrong word in the 12 | The words are standard BIP39, so the checksum fails before the passphrase is ever involved |
The recovery order, from the documented paths
Every step below restates what Samourai’s own recovery guide, Electrum’s wallet format list and Sparrow’s source code say. This tool never asks you for a single backup word, and no wallet, support agent or recovery service should either. Work through it in order rather than guessing.
Ticks are saved on this device only. Nothing you tick is sent anywhere.
What do people who tried to recover Samourai report?
Four accounts, read on 3 October 2026 across three threads on bitcointalk and the project’s own issue tracker. Treat them as testimony about a process, not as evidence about your wallet.
On 28 April 2024, four days after the takedown, a poster using the name hexakill described opening the app to find a recent incoming payment visible but the balance reading zero, and said they had tried three different wallets with the 12 words and recovered nothing. Later the same evening they posted that both transactions were there once the passphrase was included, and that they would move the coins to a new wallet.
The day before, a poster using the name Electric Samourai listed the paths they had tried after a checksum error, and the list shows the other trap: premix and postmix were typed as 214783645 and 214783646, each a digit short of the real index. A responder pointed them at Electrum’s own account detection and the format list in its repository.
On 20 July 2025, more than a year later, a poster using the name tez02843 opened the app, saw zero and assumed theft before reading the news. Running a full node, with Sparrow connected and the correct passphrase, they found nothing on legacy, and the balance and history appeared only after switching to nested segwit. In the same thread as hexakill, a poster using the name x7007 was still stuck in November 2024, having tried around a hundred individual private keys in another wallet.
The range is narrow and it points one way. Three of the four recovered, two within hours, and in every case the blocker was an input to the derivation rather than anything to do with the prosecution. That agrees with the wallet’s own documentation and disagrees with the mood of the search results, which treat a seizure as a loss. The one still stuck months later was the one who had abandoned the documented paths and started guessing at private keys.
What should you avoid now that Samourai is gone?
The vacuum left by a dead wallet fills up with people offering to help. Two checks, both made on 3 October 2026: samourai.io, the seized official domain, does not resolve at all, and a separate domain, samourai-wallet.io, which is not the seized domain and names no operator beyond a community, publishes recovery walkthroughs, a page whose address is built around an APK download, and a page about a Samourai token. We are not linking it.
The rule that covers all of it is not negotiable: never type a recovery phrase into a web page, and never into an application you have not verified yourself. Samourai’s own guide points at a mnemonic converter for revealing individual private keys and says to run it offline. Run that kind of tool in a browser with a network connection and you have handed your keys to whoever served the page. Installing wallet software means checking the source and the signature first, from a project you can name.
On the privacy side, the Whirlpool coordinator died with the service, and Ashigaru’s replacement is a Tor only terminal application with an anti Sybil fee fixed at 5% of the pool size. That is the state of play rather than a suggestion, and it is a different proposition from tapping a button in a phone app.
One practical note for anyone who did mix. Sweeping a postmix account into the same new wallet as everything else links the mixed coins back to the rest of your history and undoes the privacy the mixing fees bought, which is why the accounts are kept separate, and why the same logic applies to any attempt at an anonymous wallet. Beyond that it is a question of how you want to store them, because a phone wallet with no maintainer is not a long term answer and cold storage exists for exactly this: software you can replace without the keys caring.
Frequently asked questions
Was any customer bitcoin seized when Samourai was shut down?
No. The Justice Department’s releases describe the seizure of the web servers, the samourai.io domain and the Google Play listing, and a forfeiture of $6,367,139.69 representing the fees the business earned. The wallet was non custodial, so there was no pool of customer coins for anyone to take. Funds that were in a Samourai wallet are still on chain and still controlled by the seed words and passphrase.
Do I need the Samourai app to recover my coins?
No, and you would struggle to get it anyway, since the app was removed from Google Play under a seizure warrant and the backend it relied on is gone. The seed words and passphrase restore in any wallet that supports BIP39 with a passphrase and lets you set a derivation path. Sparrow and Electrum both name the Whirlpool accounts explicitly, which saves typing twelve digit index numbers by hand.
Why does the recovery need a passphrase when other wallets treat it as optional?
Because Samourai asked for one at wallet creation and used it as the BIP39 passphrase, so for almost every Samourai user it is not optional at all. The 12 words on their own derive a valid but different wallet, which is why so many people report a zero balance and assume the worst. The project’s own issue tracker has an open report of this exact behaviour from January 2019.
What is the Bad Bank account and do I need to restore it?
It held toxic change, meaning the change outputs from Whirlpool deposits that would link mixed coins back to their source if they were spent together. It sits at m/84’/0’/2147483644’ and Electrum lists it as Samourai Bad Bank. Restore it if you used Whirlpool at all, because it can hold a real balance that the deposit account does not show, and keep it separate from your mixed coins.
Can I still use Whirlpool to mix coins?
Not the original one. The coordinator went offline with the April 2024 seizure. Ashigaru, a fork of the codebase, announced a new Whirlpool implementation on 23 June 2025 that is Tor only, runs from a terminal application and charges a fixed anti Sybil fee of 5% of the pool size on pools of 0.25 and 0.025 bitcoin. It is a separate project that states it holds none of Samourai’s keys.
I have the 12 words but not the passphrase. Is there anything to be done?
If you genuinely cannot reproduce it, the honest answer is that the wallet is out of reach, because the passphrase is part of the key derivation and nothing on the network can be asked to help. The practical steps are to write out every variant you might plausibly have used, including spacing and capitalisation, and to test them on an offline machine. Do not hand your words to any service offering to do this for you.
Finished the page? The same five questions from the top, to see what stuck.
This article is general information about wallet security and is not financial advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. Speak to a suitably qualified professional about your own situation, and remember that in self custody the security decisions are yours alone.
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