Welcome to this week’s Financial Freedom Report.
In Russia, lawmakers approved new amendments expanding financial surveillance under the country’s “foreign agents” law. Banks will be required to provide officials with information on the financial activity of designated individuals and organizations, giving the state another way to monitor, isolate, and financially pressure independent media, NGOs, journalists, and private citizens.
In freedom tech news, Cashu.me launched a native iOS and Android version of its ecash wallet, which was previously only available as a progressive web app (PWA). The new native apps add a more accessible mobile experience for human rights defenders to make private bitcoin payments under authoritarian regimes.
We end with the first edition of Coin Center’s new newsletter “Peer-to-Peer,” which focuses on technological authoritarianism and the open-source tools being built to resist it. Readers of the Financial Freedom Report may find this new content highly informative and complementary to our reporting.
Global News
Russia | Amendments to Foreign Agent Law Expand Financial Surveillance
In June, Russia approved new amendments tightening the country’s “foreign agents” law. Since its introduction in 2012, the law has expanded to include nearly 1,000 NGOs, media outlets, journalists, and private individuals. The amendments mandate that banks provide officials with information about designated individuals’ and organizations’ transactions, accounts, deposits, and financial activity within three working days of a request. The amendments also expand advertising restrictions, weaken procedural protections against inspections, and make it harder for those on the registry to be removed.
In context: Authoritarian regimes use foreign agent laws to brand people and organizations as serving outside interests, then use that label to isolate them from money, media, partners, and public life. Russia’s model has become a template for modern repression, with similar “foreign agent” laws passed in Georgia and Nicaragua.
Nicaragua | French Student Expelled Over Social Media Post
French university student Gabriel Lepinay had only a few hours left in Nicaragua when a short Instagram story turned his trip into an interrogation. Lepinay was walking Managua’s waterfront when he recorded the heavy police presence and red-and-black Sandinista flags around him. A police officer saw him recording, seized his phone, and forced him against a wall at gunpoint. Uniformed and plainclothes officers demanded his password to search his device, found the Instagram story, and took him to a detention center. According to Confidencial, Lepinay was held for eleven hours and repeatedly questioned whether he worked for the press, had international ties, or opposed the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
In context: Agents reportedly used ChatGPT’s voice feature to translate their questions, an example of ordinary AI tools being folded into a means of repression. He says officers denied him both access to a lawyer and contact with the French Embassy. He was later taken in handcuffs to the Costa Rican border and expelled. The arrest and expulsion came just weeks before Ortega announced that Nicaragua will “never again” hold elections, further consolidating his authoritarian regime.
Nigeria | Tinubu Establishes Virtual Asset Council
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu signed an executive order establishing a coordinated framework for the regulation of digital assets. The new “Virtual Asset Council” will be chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria, with the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission, Nigeria Revenue Service, and other financial and national security officials also involved. The Nigerian SEC will oversee virtual assets classified as securities, while the central bank will register payment, custody, settlement, and other non-security assets.
In context: In an authoritarian country where officials have arrested critics, restricted protests, and harassed journalists, a centralized framework linking digital asset oversight to national security agencies could become a powerful tool for surveillance and selective enforcement.
China | Economic Growth Falls to One of the Lowest Levels in Decades
China’s economy grew 4.3% year over year in the second quarter, one of its lowest quarterly growth rates in decades, barring the COVID-19 pandemic. Households and workers are feeling the slowdown through weak consumer demand, a prolonged property crisis, and a worsening economy. Retail sales rose just 1% in June, signs that people are spending less, businesses are investing less, and the old engines of growth are weakening for more than 1.4 billion people living under an authoritarian regime.
Why this matters: Beijing sets official growth targets and rarely misses them, while economists have long questioned whether headline GDP figures reflect conditions on the ground. As growth weakens, the regime has more incentive to manage both the economy and the information people can access in order to understand it.
Recommended Content
How To Combat Transnational Repression by Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen
Authoritarian repression no longer stops at national borders. In this Journal of Democracy essay, digital rights researchers Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen examine how regimes harass, abduct, and even kill exiles and diaspora critics abroad, and why accountability for transnational repression so often fails. They identify the gaps that enable transnational repression to persist and outline how democracies can better protect human rights defenders and prevent regimes from exporting repression onto democratic soil.
Bitcoin and Freedom Tech News
Cashu Me | Native iOS and Android Wallet Launched
Cashu Me, a popular Cashu ecash wallet previously available as a progressive web app (PWA), launched in beta as a native app for iOS and Android. The web version helped preserve open access by letting users harness Bitcoin and ecash without relying on app stores. The new native versions add a more powerful mobile ecash experience with support for tap-to-pay, the Lightning Network, and on-chain Bitcoin. That said, ecash is still a custodial tool: users must trust mints (ecash custodians) to hold their funds on their behalf. This makes it useful for small private payments, but less suitable for long-term savings.
Why this matters: Ecash can make Bitcoin payments more private and easier to use. The PWA keeps onboarding available outside app-store gatekeepers, while the native app can make the experience more reliable and accessible. For human rights defenders, private payments are most useful when they are also easy to access.
Breez x Turnkey | Non-Custodial Bitcoin for Embedded Wallets
Breez, a Bitcoin payments infrastructure company, partnered with Turnkey, an embedded wallet provider, to make it easier for apps to add Bitcoin payments without holding user funds. Embedded wallets are wallets built directly into an app, so users can send or receive bitcoin without opening a separate Bitcoin wallet. Usually, the app holds users’ private keys on their behalf, but that makes the app a custodian. The idea behind this integration is to separate the app from control over the money. With Turnkey, users’ private keys are kept outside the app’s servers, and payments are signed inside secure enclaves (private computing environments). Users can approve payments with a passkey, while apps can also support pre-approved or automated payment flows without ever holding the private keys themselves.
Why this matters: If more apps can offer trust-minimized Bitcoin payments with a simple user experience, self-custody becomes more accessible to dissidents and civil society.
Blitz Wallet | Mobile Money Payments Added
Blitz Wallet, an open-source Bitcoin wallet, added the ability to pay mobile money accounts using Bitcoin, with recipients receiving local currency. Mobile money lets users store, send, and receive funds through a phone number, often without needing a traditional bank account. It is a widely used payment standard across parts of Africa and the global majority.
Why this matters: The integration gives users another way to move from Bitcoin into local payment rails. For human rights defenders, civil society groups, and families receiving support from abroad, this can make Bitcoin more practical for remittances, emergency funding, and everyday expenses without requiring every recipient to use a Bitcoin wallet.
Bitcoin Design Community | AI-Ready Design Guide Announced
The Bitcoin Design Community, an HRF grantee and Bitcoin design initiative, started a new project to make the Bitcoin Design Guide usable by AI agents. The goal is to turn the guide from a resource written mainly for humans into something agentic AI tools can pull from when building Bitcoin and Lightning wallets and other freedom tech tools.
Why this matters: An AI-compatible design guide could help more developers build wallets that follow better privacy, security, and usability patterns from the start, to the benefit of human rights defenders using freedom money.
Maelstrom | Tadge Dryja Bitcoin Developer Grant
Maelstrom, a decentralized technology fund, awarded its sixth Bitcoin developer grant to Tadge Dryja, one of the most important developers in Bitcoin’s history. Dryja is best known as a co-inventor of the Lightning Network, which helped make faster and lower-cost Bitcoin payments possible, and as the designer of Utreexo, a project that aims to make Bitcoin nodes easier to run by reducing storage requirements. He has also served as CTO of Lightning Labs and as a research scientist at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Dryja’s new work will focus on helping Bitcoin prepare for potential risks from quantum computing or other cryptographic failures, ensuring that Bitcoin remains resilient for human rights defenders over the decades to come.
Bitcoin Recommended Content
Coin Center Substack: Peer-to-Peer
Coin Center, a non-profit focused on policy issues facing Bitcoin, launched Peer-to-Peer, a new Substack publication focused on technological authoritarianism and the open-source tools being built to resist it. In its first issue, the authors argue that privacy and autonomy are being quietly eroded by governments and corporations through surveillance, censorship, debanking, and control over digital infrastructure. Check it out here.
