Ever since the second Trump administration in the US, the rhetoric has somewhat cooled down in relation to mixers and privacy. In particular, the SEC is no longer picking fights with crypto projects out of spite anymore. Unfortunately, in other countries it’s not as cooled down, so let’s see how crypto privacy services have fared after the worldwide crackdown.
Even amidst all the doom and gloom, there are still some things to be happy about in relation to crypto privacy, and so we will take some time out of your reading of this section to celebrate these small wins.
The Bad: Samourai Guilty Plea
You might have remembered that a couple of years ago, the US government arrested the Samourai Wallet developers. This essentially forced all the other open-source projects to remove all the code that utilizes the Whirlpool coordinator. Well this year, the two Samourai develeopers, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, had entered a guilty plea in order to receive lesser sentences.
This means that the federal government is still forcing privacy developers to suffer for creating software that has a net benefit for others, if the software is used in ways that the United States does not like.
“Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill’s guilty pleas prove their cryptocurrency mixing service―Samourai Wallet―was designed to conceal criminal financial transactions and launder millions of dollars of dirty money.”
FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G. Raia (Source)
Because of the obsession of federal law enforcement with Coinjoin software, these developers are going to spend many years in prison, potentially as long as Ross Ulbricht. This goes on to show you that the government treats privacy software that can be misuses with more severity than something like a drive-by shooting or sexual assault.
It is also worth noting that the US government has not yet made any moves against JoinMarket, which is the only remaining CoinJoin software that is still operational (If we ignore various Wasabi coordinators such as Kruw). This is probably because it is not as user-friendly as Wasabi or Samourai Wallet, and thus it has a smaller user base.
Additionally, Wikipedia cites the following: “A later-revealed DOJ memorandum acknowledged that the legality of crypto-mixing services was not fully settled under the current financial regulatory framework and that the tools are not inherently illegal.”
The Bad: eXch
I have to admit, I had a falling out with eXch around a year ago in relation to this site. But that does not justify what has happened to it.
So around May 2025, the FIOD government organization from the Netherlands who was responsible for taking down the Sinbad Mixer announced that they have seized the eXch server and about $32 million of the various coins stored in their hot wallet. A few days prior, eXch went AWOL on Bitcointalk, having announced that they have learned of plans from “friends in the government” tipped them off of the takedown operation.
You are probably wondering what lead to the government getting involved in this. Well in early February 2025, Bybit suffered a massive breach, of about 1.3 billion dollars. That breach was caused by the infamous Lazarus Group. The stolen money was split up and laundered through various platforms. Incidentially, some of the money passed through eXch.
Around the same time, the ByBit exchange announced a bounty program for people who would help them recover any amount of the stolen funds. Apparently many of the bounty hunters (how ironic that I’m using this term for blockchain analysis actors) decided to simlpy hound privacy services with emails asking them for compensation. eXch understandably refused to cooperate, since ByBit was not interested in resolving their complaints regarding user’ frozen deposits from using the service, but that infuriated European law enforcement.
Eventually they decided to take matters to their own hands and forcibly shut down the service.
Two Major Problems Caused By This Action
Now let’s ignore the fact that exchangers had processed the stolen funds for a minute. There are two main problems with this action. First of all, a top global exchange should not be incompetent enough to blindly sign smart contracts without checking the contents. Everyone knows that the cryptocurrency industry is the most targetted industry by hackers in the world, and exchanges are in the center of those cross-hairs. So why didn’t Bybit proactively have their large security team implement these precautions? It is worth noting that this kind of thing would not have happened at an exchange such as Coinbase for example, because they take security very seriously. They are I beleive the only exchange that disabled receiving addresses of the hackers during the 2020 Twitter hacks.
The second problem is that the classification sent major shockwaves through payment processors. Now all of a sudden, centralized payment processors had the right to freeze arbirary people&#s payments jsut because they suspected that the coins came from eXch, irrespective of whether or not the coins actually had anything to do with the hack. A number of different payment processors took part in the blockade. Where the lost money actually goes is up to speculation. Personally, I think governments receive the vast majority of the money. So not even ByBit which is diaobolical.
In other words, governments use financial crypto crime to enrich themselves, and payment processors are complicit in this and are happy to block random users’ payments to help them, whether the official excuse is “regulatory requirements” or not.
The Bad: TradeOgre
TradeOgre was a bit of a surprise. It had no red flags or anything like that, no allegations of misuse, no bad actors - it just simply went offline one day. No operator precence on social media or Bitcointalk to explain what was going on. The trouble started happening around August 2025. There were rumors swirling around that the operator had died and that the hosting had simply expired.
That theory sounded plausible because all of the coins stayed intact in the deposit addresses for several days. Other suspected an exit scam. But for the same reason, the majority found this to be unlikely to be the case. How can you pull off an exit scam without moving the funds? However, we finally found the answer a month later, when the Canadian authorities - RMCP to be specific - announced that they had seized the service, and confirmed that the administrator had passed away. Why Canada specifically I don’t know. We are still waiting for answers.
The Good: Altcoinstalks
After Bitcointalk banned mixers, people were waiting to see where the mixer industry would go. Altcoinstalks was already pitched as a forum that would accomodate mixers, and it did not disappoint. Most mixers moved their annuncement topics to that forum, and although it is still quite small, it was still able to accomodate all of the new users. The new Teleport feature designed by the administration aided greatly at that.
Meanwhile Bitcointalk continued to ban anything resembling a mixer out of sight. Jambler was already banned, and anything that extended to “fixing your problematic BTC” i.e. flagged coins were also banned. It is certainly not something that they want to do, but it is telling when the government believes they can simply force people to keep coins that won’t be accepted anywhere, thereby blacklisting them.
