The surprise release of a new privacy wallet named Ashigaru (Japanese for foot soldier) forked from Samourai’s pre-existing privacy wallet, which was released by an anonymous team, whose servers are hosted in Russia, outside the reach of tyrannical US government authorities, has demonstrated defnitively, that privacy in Bitcoin has not died.
Ashigaru is the Response From Cypherpunks in Bitcoin
Ashigaru is a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, developed as a fork of the Samourai Wallet following the legal troubles faced by its creators. Launched in September 2024, Ashigaru aims to continue the mission of enabling private and censorship-resistant transactions on the Bitcoin network. The project is rooted in the cypherpunk principles of decentralization, privacy, and free open source software, offering users a secure way to engage in Bitcoin-based commerce without exposing themselves to surveillance or tyrannical regulatory overreach. Ashigaru’s core features include mandatory use of Dojo nodes and CoinJoin transactions, which ensure that users’ privacy is protected from blockchain surveillance companies, law enforcement interference, and other tracking mechanisms.
The launch of Ashigaru comes at a critical time for the Bitcoin privacy ecosystem, which has been shaken by the U.S. government’s aggressive stance against developers creating privacy-enhancing tools. The arrest of Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill marked a significant escalation in the government’s efforts to target software that facilitates anonymous transactions, and sent a chilling shockwave throughout the Bitcoin community. The U.S. Department of Justice accused them of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting service and enabling money laundering, even though Samourai was a non-custodial wallet, and the developers had no control over user funds at any point. This unprecedented legal action, which is a never-before-seen authoritarian overreach which aims to overturn 40 years of legal precedent of code being deemed as protected free speech under the US first amendment, has led to concerns within the community about the future of privacy tools in the face of increasingly dystopian regulatory pressure.
Despite these challenges, the Ashigaru project represents a renewed commitment to preserving privacy within the Bitcoin ecosystem, by any means necessary. By forking the Samourai Wallet, the anonymous Ashigaru developers, who are unrelated to the original team, seek to provide users with a decentralized alternative that does not rely on centralized servers vulnerable to government intervention. The use of Dojo nodes, for example, allows users to operate their own Bitcoin node, ensuring that their transactions remain anonymous and free from third-party scrutiny. This approach enhances the resilience of the network against potential regulatory crackdowns, while still offering the same privacy features that made Samourai Wallet so popular among Bitcoin users.
The Ashigaru project, by continuing the development of privacy-enhancing tools, suggests that Bitcoin’s journey is far from over, and that new advancements are still needed to ensure that it remains a viable tool for those seeking financial freedom and privacy in an increasingly authoritarian and over-regulated world.
Download Ashigaru here (Tor required)
An Evolutionary Advance of a Legendary Project
Ashigaru, following in the footsteps of its predecessor Samourai Wallet, is only available for download over the Tor network, demonstrating the project’s commitment to privacy and security. This approach ensures that users can access and download the wallet without leaving a traceable footprint, making it much harder for surveillance efforts to monitor or restrict access to the software. By leveraging Tor’s anonymizing capabilities, Ashigaru reinforces its stance as a tool for private commerce, free from the tracking, censorship, and control sought by oppressive governments and centralized institutions.
One of the key features that Ashigaru inherits from Samourai Wallet is PayNym Support, which allows users to interact with reusable payment codes via a BIP47 protocol. These payment codes are represented by a unique Pepehash avatar system, making it easier for users to manage their privacy-enhanced transactions. By using this system, users can maintain a consistent, reusable payment identifier without exposing their personal information or wallet addresses. This feature adds an extra layer of privacy, allowing for seamless interactions while protecting against surveillance.
Additionally, Ashigaru incorporates onion routing, enabling users to connect to their Dojo node and broadcast transactions over the Tor network, ensuring anonymity throughout the transaction process. Features like Ricochet add further distance between the transaction origin and its final destination, making it more difficult for blockchain observers to track the source of funds. Payjoin is also supported for CoinJoin spends that are indistinguishable from normal transactions. The wallet also supports encrypted key recovery, allowing users to securely recover their mnemonic phrase with a passphrase, ensuring that the private keys can be recovered and imported into other wallets while maintaining security.
Ashigaru wallet builds on Samourai’s decentralized Soroban CoinJoin, a privacy tool that was nearing release when the Samourai team faced unjust incarceration. Soroban enhances privacy by enabling decentralized CoinJoin transactions through a network of user-operated Dojo nodes, removing the need for a centralized coordinator. Ashigaru does not currently implement Samourai’s Whirlpool CoinJoin, which relies on a centralized coordinator to facilitate mixing. By focusing on Soroban, Ashigaru ensures that its CoinJoin implementation remains fully decentralized and resistant to surveillance or external control. It is yet to be determined if the Ashigaru team has plans to also implement Whirpool at some future date.
Ashigaru extends privacy features to post-mix transactions with post-mix spending and peer-to-peer CoinJoins, allowing users to spend their funds after mixing with others, undermining blockchain analysis and transaction tracing efforts. Stealth mode offers a decoy application that masks the true function of the wallet, while coin control gives users granular control over their UTXOs, enabling them to label, freeze, and unfreeze specific outputs, and manage Doxxic change. With batch spending to save on fees, and a smart mining fee algorithm to optimize transaction rates, Ashigaru not only preserves the ethos of privacy inspired by Samourai but also provides practical, efficient tools for Bitcoin transactions in an increasingly surveilled financial landscape.
After Samourai Arrests, the Game has Changed
The Ashigaru developers’ decision to maintain anonymity and host their servers outside the reach of Western governments marks the beginning of a critical shift in how privacy-focused technologies are developed. By evading the grasp of regulatory regimes that seek to impose total financial surveillance and censorship, Ashigaru sets a precedent for the future of “freedom tech.” This new wave of innovation puts user privacy, data protection, and individual sovereignty at the forefront, shielding users from the growing efforts of governments to construct a digital panopticon, a surveillance apparatus aimed at controlling dissent and silencing opposition.
Western governments, particularly those of the U.S. and Europe, are increasingly seeking to implement systems of total financial surveillance under the guise of combating crime and terrorism. The arrests of developers from projects like Samourai Wallet, Tornado Cash, and the subsequent crackdown on privacy-enhancing tools like encrypted messaging apps like Signal, and Telegram, underscore the lengths to which these governments will go to assert control over financial privacy. By positioning themselves in jurisdictions beyond the reach of these powers, Ashigaru is able to maintain the development of its privacy tools free from government interference, offering users critical protection against financial tracking and punitive state actions.
This trend represents a significant evolution in the way privacy-focused projects are built and deployed. Anonymity and the strategic location of servers in more favorable jurisdictions create a decentralized development ecosystem that is harder for governments to attack or dismantle. The result is a more resilient infrastructure for privacy technologies, enabling users to protect their financial activities and communications from surveillance. This form of decentralized resistance is crucial in an age where governments seek to centralize control over all aspects of digital life, transforming financial systems into instruments of coercion and punishment against those who defy state narratives or political orthodoxy.
As governments in the West move closer to implementing centralized digital currencies, biometric tracking, and other tools of surveillance capitalism, the importance of freedom tech cannot be overstated. Projects like Ashigaru represent a counterweight to this encroaching digital gulag, offering individuals a way to preserve their autonomy and engage in financial activities without being monitored or restricted. This battle for privacy and freedom is not just about the technology itself but about defending fundamental rights in a world where total surveillance is increasingly the default. The future of freedom tech will depend on the continued efforts of developers who are willing to innovate outside of the control of repressive regimes, ensuring that privacy remains a right, not a privilege, in the digital age.
