Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche walked onto the Bitcoin 2026 stage in Las Vegas this afternoon and addressed the two prosecutions that have defined the relationship between the Department of Justice and the privacy-focused side of crypto: Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet. Bitcoin Magazine's live coverage of the Code and Country forum confirmed the address, which lands at a politically charged moment for both cases.
Blanche is the same official who, as Deputy Attorney General in April 2025, signed the four-page memo telling DOJ staff to stop pursuing mixers, exchanges, and offline wallets for the conduct of their users. He was elevated to acting AG earlier this month after President Trump removed Pam Bondi. His appearance at the Venetian was billed as part of the Code and Country 2026 policy track moderated by Paul Grewal, alongside FBI Director Kash Patel's separately scheduled session titled "Code is Free Speech: Ending the War on Bitcoin."
A memo that did not stop the prison sentences
The political framing of the appearance is generous to the administration. The legal record is harder. In the Roman Storm case, prosecutors cited the Blanche memo to drop only one part of one charge. Storm was still convicted on a count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter business, and sentencing is pending. The Samourai Wallet outcome was bleaker for developers: founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and received five and four years in federal prison respectively, despite their defense team explicitly invoking the Blanche memo when asking the judge to dismiss the case.
Coin Center's executive director Peter Van Valkenburgh has stated publicly that the memo "has not provided meaningful protection to developers, given the outcomes in the Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet cases." That gap, between the policy signal Blanche sent in April 2025 and the actual courtroom results, is the subtext of his appearance today.
Why the room cared
The Code and Country track at Bitcoin 2026 is designed for builders who write the protocols, not the lobbyists who package them. For that audience, the Blanche memo was the closest thing to a federal commitment that writing privacy-preserving code would not be treated as operating an unlicensed money transmitter. The Samourai sentences and the Storm conviction proved that DOJ prosecutors retained substantial discretion despite the memo, and that judges were not obligated to treat it as binding policy.
Blanche walking into that room is itself a notable act. The DOJ rarely sends its top official to a single-asset industry conference, and almost never to one where past prosecutions are the elephant in the room. The decision to take the stage anyway suggests the administration sees a political cost in letting the developer-rights narrative harden against it ahead of the CLARITY Act vote that Senator Cynthia Lummis and others are pushing through Congress.
The ethics overhang
Blanche's appearance also lands while a separate ethics question is unresolved. Public disclosures showed that he held between $159,000 and $485,000 in various cryptocurrencies at the time he signed the April 2025 enforcement memo, despite a divestment pledge tied to crypto-related work. That detail has resurfaced repeatedly in coverage of his elevation to acting AG and is one reason the Bitcoin policy world treats his pronouncements with cautious optimism rather than relief.
For users of self-custody wallets and the non-custodial card category that has grown alongside them, the Tornado Cash and Samourai outcomes are not abstract. They set the boundary on what kinds of privacy tooling can be built and shipped from US soil. Today's Bitcoin 2026 address is the first time the architect of the DOJ's stated restraint has had to defend that record in front of the people who actually write the code.
What to watch next
Three signals will tell us whether today's remarks were substantive or stage-managed:
- Whether DOJ files any post-conviction relief or sentencing-position changes in the Storm case before sentencing.
- Whether the department issues any updated guidance clarifying that future Samourai-style prosecutions require explicit FinCEN coordination, after the Bitcoin Policy Institute revealed FinCEN had warned DOJ the Samourai theory violated Treasury guidance.
- Whether Blanche's remarks are followed by a written policy document, or remain a verbal commitment with no enforceable text.
Without one of those, the address registers as outreach rather than reform.
Overview
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet prosecutions on stage at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas on April 27, 2026, the same day FBI Director Kash Patel was scheduled to speak on the same policy track. Blanche authored the April 2025 DOJ memo intended to limit prosecutions of crypto developers, but Roman Storm was convicted anyway and Samourai founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill received federal prison sentences of five and four years. The appearance is significant because it forced the administration's top legal official to defend the gap between the memo and the actual case outcomes in front of the Bitcoin developer community.
