Ashigaru Wallet Review (2026): Whirlpool, Terminal, Tor-Only Access

You cannot download Ashigaru in a normal browser. There is no App Store listing, no Play Store listing, and no HTTPS download button that works. The software lives on a .onion address, and if you want it you open Tor first.

That single design decision tells you most of what you need to know. Ashigaru is a fork of Samourai Wallet run by an anonymous team that describes itself as former Samourai users with no connection to the original developers. It exists because in April 2024 the US Department of Justice indicted Samourai's co-founders and seized the servers, and Whirlpool, the coinjoin implementation a certain kind of Bitcoiner had built their privacy around, went dark.

It came back on June 23, 2025. The interesting question in 2026 is not whether it works. It is whether anyone is still home.

Five things to know before you go looking for it:

• Distribution is Tor-only, by design. No app stores, no clearnet downloads. This is a deliberate choice about jurisdiction and takedown resistance, and it is also the single biggest reason to be careful about where you get the file.
• Whirlpool is genuinely back. Two pools, 0.025 BTC and 0.25 BTC, with a one-time 5% anti-Sybil fee on the pool denomination. Remixes after that are free forever, mining fees aside.
• There are three pieces, not one. A mobile wallet for Android, a desktop Terminal application, and the coinjoin coordinator itself. Most coverage conflates them.
• The team is anonymous, and that is the trade. Nobody to subpoena is also nobody to hold accountable. They publish a PGP-signed warrant canary instead, which is a better substitute than it sounds.
• No new release since June 2025. The software has been still for fourteen months. That is not the same as abandoned, and the section below shows you how to check for yourself.

At a glance: Ashigaru (2026)

What is Ashigaru?

Ashigaru is a continuation of Samourai Wallet's privacy tooling, rebuilt and re-released by people who are not the original developers and will not say who they are.

The project shipped its mobile wallet on September 20, 2024, five months after the Samourai indictment. It is an Android fork that keeps the tools the original was known for: coin control, batch spending, Ricochet for adding hops between your coins and their origin, PayNyms for reusable payment codes under BIP47, encrypted BIP39 recovery, and a stealth mode that hides the app behind a decoy launcher. It connects to your own Dojo full node rather than to anyone's server.

Nine months later, on June 23, 2025, two more pieces landed together. Ashigaru Terminal is a desktop application forked from Sparrow Terminal that defaults to .onion Electrum servers. And Ashigaru Whirlpool is the coinjoin coordinator, which is the piece that mattered, because a coinjoin implementation without a coordinator is a car without an engine.

The stated mission is unglamorous and worth quoting plainly: private, voluntary online commerce without tracking or surveillance. There is no social media presence. The project tells you to verify everything through its own site and nowhere else.

Who should use Ashigaru, and who shouldn't

Use it if you were a Samourai user who wants the same tools back, if you already run a Dojo node, or if you have a specific reason to want fixed-denomination coinjoins that Wasabi's variable-amount model does not serve.

Do not use it as your first Bitcoin wallet. The download alone requires Tor, the mobile app is Android-only, the desktop client is a terminal interface, and coinjoining requires leaving a machine online for hours. None of that is hostile, but all of it assumes you already know what you are doing.

There is also an honest question of scale. You need at least 0.025 BTC to enter the smaller pool, and you will pay 5% of that denomination to get in. For anyone holding less, the fee is a large fraction of the stack and the answer is probably to improve your habits rather than mix.

How to download and verify Ashigaru

This is the part that deserves the most care, because Tor-only distribution cuts both ways. It makes the project hard to take down, and it also means there is no familiar authority telling you that the file you just got is the real one.

Start from the right place. The project's clearnet site publishes the .onion address. Reach the download page from there, in Tor Browser, rather than from a search result or a link somebody sent you. If a download button misbehaves, the project's own guidance is to copy the .onion URL into Tor Browser by hand rather than clicking through.

Then verify the file. Each release publishes a SHA-256 hash inside a PGP-signed message. Two steps follow from that: check the signature on the message using the Ashigaru Dev key, which can be confirmed on Keybase, then compute the hash of the file you downloaded and confirm it matches the one in the signed message.

Doing only the first half is the common mistake. A valid signature proves the message is genuine. It says nothing about the file sitting in your downloads folder until you compare the hash.

The code repository itself is also Tor-only, published under GPL v3. That means the source can be read and rebuilt by anyone willing to work over Tor, which is a meaningfully stronger position than a closed binary, even if the audience able to take advantage of it is small.

Whirlpool: what it costs and how it works

Whirlpool is a Zerolink coinjoin. You enter a pool of a fixed size, your coins are mixed with others of exactly the same denomination, and the outputs become difficult to attribute to any particular input.

Two pools are running. The 0.025 BTC pool charges an anti-Sybil fee of 0.00125 BTC, and the 0.25 BTC pool charges 0.0125 BTC. Both are 5% of the denomination, and both are charged once, on the entry transaction known as Tx0. A single Tx0 can create up to 20 UTXOs, each of which becomes eligible to mix after one on-chain confirmation.

The part worth understanding is what happens next. Remixing is free, indefinitely. After the entry fee, your coins can cycle through the pool again and again for the cost of mining fees alone, and each pass adds to the anonymity set. The 5% is expensive read as a single transaction cost and much less so read as a permanent membership.

The coordinator is Tor-only, with no clearnet connections permitted at all.

What changed from Samourai's Whirlpool

The project spent roughly six months rebuilding rather than simply restarting the old code, and several of the changes address weaknesses in the original design.

RSA keys used in the Chaumian blinding are no longer distributed to clients, which removes a path by which inputs could potentially be linked to outputs. Multisig addresses are no longer permitted as mix-to outputs. Tor identity isolation now prevents the registration and output-reveal stages of a mix from being linked by session. And the coordinator can connect to any Dojo full node over Tor rather than depending on a local RPC connection.

One decision is more political than technical: Samourai's existing unspent capacity was deliberately excluded from the new liquidity pools. The new system starts clean rather than inheriting coins connected to a seized operation.

Is the project still alive?

Fourteen months have passed since the last release or announcement. For most software that would read as abandonment, and for a privacy tool it would be disqualifying. The evidence says otherwise, and you can check it yourself in about a minute.

The project publishes a PGP-signed warrant canary stating that it has received and complied with zero requests for information from any third party, including government agencies. It commits to renewing the notice every 90 days, and it says plainly that if the notice is not renewed, you should assume the worst.

It was last signed on July 30, 2026. The declaration cites Bitcoin block 960292 as its timestamp, and that block was mined on July 30, 2026 at 18:30 UTC, which matches. On a 90-day cycle the next renewal falls due around October 28, 2026.

So the correct reading is a project that has stopped shipping features but has not stopped operating. Independent coverage in June 2026 found the coordinator running. Before you commit funds, check the canary date yourself, and treat a lapse well past the 90-day mark as the signal the project says it is.

Ashigaru versus the alternatives

Wasabi is the easier tool, and after zkSNACKs shut down its own coordinator in June 2024 it now runs on community-operated coordinators. JoinMarket is the most decentralised of the three, using time-locked fidelity bonds instead of a coordinator, and it has never been the subject of US enforcement action.

Ashigaru's argument against both is fixed denominations and a direct lineage from the Samourai toolset. If neither of those matters to you, one of the other two is probably the easier path.

Worth noting for desktop users: Sparrow removed its own Whirlpool integration in version 1.9.0 after the Samourai indictment and has not restored it. Sparrow remains excellent for coin control, labelling, and multisig. It no longer mixes.

The legal context

The reason this software exists is a prosecution, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Samourai's co-founders were charged in April 2024 with money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, on the theory that running a coinjoin coordinator made them a money transmitter. The servers were seized and the tooling stopped.

The chill spread fast. Sparrow removed Whirlpool, Phoenix withdrew from the US market days later, and Wallet of Satoshi left too.

Ashigaru's response to that environment is structural: anonymous operators, Tor-only distribution, a Tor-only repository, no social media, and a warrant canary in place of a corporate contact. Whether that posture protects the operators is not a question anyone can answer from the outside. What it does mean for you is that there is no company to call, no support agreement, and no recourse if something breaks.

That is a real cost, and you should price it in rather than wave it away.

Frequently asked questions

The verdict

Ashigaru does the thing it set out to do. Whirlpool is running again, the rebuild fixed real weaknesses in the original design, and the fee model is more reasonable than the headline 5% suggests once you understand that remixes are free.

The costs are equally clear. Tor-only distribution raises the floor on competence required, and the team is anonymous, so trust rests on signed releases and a canary rather than on anyone's reputation.

The software has not moved in fourteen months. And a central coordinator remains the thing that failed last time, for legal rather than technical reasons.

If you were a Samourai user, this is the closest thing to what you lost, and it is worth your time. If you are looking for your first privacy tool, Wasabi is easier and Sparrow will get your coin control habits right before you spend anything on mixing. Either way, check the canary before you send funds.

Reviewed against Ashigaru Mobile v1.1.1 and Ashigaru Terminal v1.0.0, with the warrant canary current as of July 30, 2026. Bitcoin Products writes research-based reviews using project documentation, source releases, and public reporting.