I Showed Them the Blockchain. They Said It Was the First They Had Heard of It.
I Showed Them the Blockchain. They Said It Was the First They Had Heard of It.
By Sam Ikkurty
They arrived at 8:40 in the morning.
Ten people. Four CFTC lawyers carrying laptops. Six others, including four U.S. Marshals with weapons on their hips, who would spend the next six hours walking through my home. They knocked on the door. I opened it. They handed me papers and told me a judgment had been obtained against me.
I called my lawyer, Jamie Nawaday at Seward & Kissel in New York. She spoke to the CFTC lawyers from my phone. After that call, they asked to come inside. I let them in. I had nothing to hide. I had never had anything to hide. The entire financial history of Rose City Income Fund was sitting on a public blockchain that anyone in the world could read at any moment without asking my permission.
They settled around my dining table. Heather Dasso. Candy Haan. James L. Kopecky, the court-appointed receiver who had just been handed control of every business and personal bank account I owned. And others. Laptops open. Questions beginning.
They stayed until 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
The Moment I Opened Etherscan
At some point in those six hours — I do not remember exactly when, because I said it many times — I opened Etherscan.io on my screen and showed them the wallet.
I walked them through it. The wallet address. The timestamps. The transaction hashes. The sender and recipient fields. The amounts — every single one recorded to 18 decimal places, accurate to a precision that no human accountant has ever achieved with a pen and paper, because this precision does not come from careful bookkeeping. It comes from the mathematics of the Ethereum protocol itself.
I showed them the Genie Technologies transactions. The inbound ETH. The 126 receive transactions showing that Genie was paying the fund — not the other way around. I showed them that every trade Rose City Income Fund had ever made was on this ledger. 885 transactions. Every purchase of OHM. Every redemption. Every rebase. Every wallet transfer. All of it. Public. Permanent. Immutable. Verifiable by anyone, anywhere, at any time, without trusting a single word I said.
Then I said the thing I had been saying all morning.
"Of all the scams happening every day in crypto — of all of them — the CFTC managed to find the only fund in the country that can show its accounting to the 18th decimal place."
And then I asked the question I kept asking, because I genuinely wanted an answer.
"When on earth did you ever see accounting going into the 18th decimal place?"
Heather Dasso looked at the screen. James L. Kopecky looked at the screen. Candy Haan looked at the screen.
And then one of them said it.
This is the first we have heard of Etherscan.
Let That Sentence Land
The CFTC's lead investigator — the person who had been building this case for months, who had already obtained an emergency ex parte order freezing every asset I owned, who would go on to submit a sworn declaration to a federal court describing Rose City's transactions — had never heard of Etherscan.
Etherscan is not an obscure tool. It is the primary public interface for the Ethereum blockchain. It is what every crypto researcher, regulator, journalist, and curious person uses to look up any Ethereum transaction, any wallet, any smart contract. It has been publicly available since 2015. The CFTC, which had been investigating a DeFi fund that operated exclusively on the Ethereum blockchain, had not encountered it.
I did not just tell them about it. I showed it to them. I explained every field on the screen. I walked them through a sample transaction from start to finish. And then I took out my phone and texted the wallet address directly to James L. Kopecky — the receiver now in charge of all my assets — so he would have it in writing, timestamped, on the day of the raid.
That text message exists. It is sitting in my phone records and in Kopecky's phone. It is dated May 16, 2022. It contains the wallet address for every transaction Rose City Income Fund ever made.
Heather Dasso submitted her declaration to the court on May 10, 2022 — six days before the raid. She admitted under oath, in a deposition on September 5, 2023, that she never reviewed the Ethereum blockchain before submitting that declaration.
She did not review it before. She was shown it during. She said it was the first she had heard of it. And then she never went back to look.
That is not an oversight. That is a decision.
They Told My Lawyer: We Are Going After Him Like Madoff
Before the questions began — on the very first day, in the initial call with Jamie Nawaday — the CFTC told my lawyer what they intended to do.
They were going to prosecute this case like Bernie Madoff.
The word "Madoff" was used repeatedly. Bernie Madoff ran a $65 billion fraud for decades. He fabricated account statements. He never made a single trade. He destroyed thousands of families. His investors lost everything.
Rose City Income Fund had 69 investors. Every single one of them made money. The mean annualized return was 303%. The lowest return any investor ever received was 16.44%. Not one investor filed a complaint. When the court gave investors the opportunity to object, 32 of them filed formal written objections — not against me, but against the government trying to destroy me.
The fund's entire financial history was on a public blockchain, accurate to 18 decimal places, available to anyone in the world to verify at any moment.
The CFTC compared this to Bernie Madoff.
They did not arrive at my home to investigate. They arrived with a conclusion. The investigation was over before it began. The Madoff framing was not an analytical judgment reached after reviewing the evidence — it was the script they brought with them, and no amount of blockchain evidence, no 18 decimal place precision, no three years of weekly investor letters sitting on my dining table was going to change it.
They Controlled My Lawyers
Here is something that has never been in any court filing.
The receiver and the CFTC controlled my frozen assets. That meant they controlled whether my lawyers got paid. And they used that control as a weapon.
They told Jamie Nawaday — directly — that her fees would be challenged if she was aggressive in defending me. They threatened her with complaints to the bar association. They made clear that the cost of vigorous representation would be paid by her, not by them.
Jamie Nawaday is a named attorney at Seward & Kissel, one of the most respected law firms in New York. She told me about these conversations. She can be deposed. Her testimony about what was said to her is admissible.
I want to be precise about what this means. The government froze every asset I owned based on a declaration written by an investigator who had never looked at the blockchain. Then the government used control of those frozen assets to threaten my attorney into softening her defense. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is not a technicality. It is the foundational guarantee that a person accused by the government can mount a real defense. What happened here was not aggressive litigation strategy. It was the systematic dismantling of my ability to fight back.
They Took Everything
Before they left, they took everything they could carry or copy.
Every electronic device was copied by the technical team. My desktop computer was physically removed. My laptop and hard drives were imaged. My phone was copied. Every hardware wallet from my safe was taken — the wallets holding the fund's crypto assets. Every paper document they could see was collected.
They took my wife's jewellery. Gold chains, necklaces — items that belonged to her personally, that had nothing to do with the fund, that were not covered by any court order authorizing seizure of fund assets. They photographed the inventory and left with it.
My wife's jewellery was never returned. More than two years later, the receiver called to offer it back. I was not in the United States. We lost it permanently.
They also took control of every email account — [email protected], my personal accounts, the fund's website hosting credentials, every bank account username and password. Business and personal. All of them. The receiver told me he was now in charge of all of it.
I gave him everything voluntarily. I had nothing to hide. I believed — genuinely, completely — that once they looked at the blockchain, once they saw the 885 transactions, once they understood what 18 decimal places meant, they would see what I saw: a fund with the most transparent financial record in the history of American commerce, operated by a person who had never taken a dollar that did not belong to him.
I thought they would dismiss the case.
They did not dismiss the case.
Now They Are Going After the Investors
The case did not end with the judgment against me. The receiver is now pursuing the investors — the people who put money into Rose City Income Fund, made a profit, received their redemptions, and went home.
These are not victims. They are profitable investors. Every one of them made money. The receiver is suing them under a "Rising Tide" methodology to claw back their profits — to take money from people who made money, in order to fund the receiver's fees and satisfy a judgment built on a declaration that the declarant admits she never verified.
The receivership website, rosecityfundreceivership.com, confirms this is ongoing as of March 2026. The receiver is "currently pursuing several profitable investors through litigation in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois."
Profitable investors. Being sued for the crime of having made money.
This is what the Madoff framing was always about. In a real Ponzi scheme, early investors receive returns funded by later investors' principal — so clawing back those returns makes sense, because they came at someone else's expense. But Rose City Income Fund was not a Ponzi scheme. The StoneTurn Group forensic report confirmed this. The blockchain confirms this. The 885 transactions confirm this. Every investor's profit came from real DeFi trading activity, not from other investors' money.
The receiver is suing people who made money, using a legal theory designed for Ponzi schemes, in a case built on a declaration written by someone who never looked at the blockchain.
What I Know Now That I Did Not Know Then
On May 16, 2022, I opened the door because I had nothing to hide. I let them in because I believed the truth would be enough. I showed them Etherscan because I thought that once they saw the blockchain — once they understood what 18 decimal places meant — the case would end.
I was wrong about one thing. I was right about the evidence. The blockchain is exactly what I said it was. The accounting is exactly as precise as I said it was. The transactions are exactly what I showed them on that screen.
What I did not understand was that they were not there to find the truth. They were there to execute a conclusion that had already been reached. The Madoff script had been written before they knocked on my door. The Etherscan screen, the 18 decimal places, the three years of weekly investor letters, the StoneTurn report, the 126 Genie receive transactions — none of it was going to change the outcome, because the outcome was not the product of the investigation. The investigation was the product of the outcome.
The text message I sent to James L. Kopecky on May 16, 2022 — the one containing the wallet address, timestamped on the day of the raid — is still in my phone. It proves that the receiver had the blockchain address from the first day. It proves that the decision not to look was a decision, not an oversight.
I am still waiting for someone to explain to me when on earth they ever saw accounting going into the 18th decimal place.
And I am still waiting for someone to explain why, when I showed it to them, they kept typing.
Sam Ikkurty is the managing partner of Rose City Income Fund and the defendant in CFTC v. Sam Ikkurty, et al., No. 1:22-cv-02465 (N.D. Ill.), currently on appeal before the Seventh Circuit as No. 24-2684. The full blockchain record, investor letters, and case documentation are available at samikkurty.com.
Note: The facts described in this post are drawn from personal recollection, public court dockets, and sworn deposition testimony. Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice.