When Nicolás Maduro’s regime froze Venezuela’s banking system in 2020, doctors and nurses kept showing up anyway. They came before dawn, on foot, through neighborhoods where the electricity had stopped and the shelves had been bare for months. Their paychecks had stopped without warning. The bolívar had collapsed so completely that even those who still received a salary watched it evaporate before they could spend it. Hospitals ran out of gloves, syringes, and basic medications.
Venezuelans in exile watched this from abroad and refused to accept it. They couldn’t wire money home through traditional banks as the regime controlled those channels. So, they built a workaround.
Using digital dollars and Bitcoin, diaspora networks and democratic activists, helped more than 80,000 health workers buy rice, cooking oil, medicine, and the basic necessities their frozen salaries could no longer cover.
The regime could freeze a bank. It could not freeze a blockchain.
Autocrats have always used economic power to subdue populations. But they have grown more sophisticated. Regimes now debank critics, freeze civic accounts, and manipulate currencies to keep citizens dependent on the state. In Cuba, the military controls and profits from the banking and remittance systems. Beijing and Moscow are racing to design and export centralized digital currencies built for surveillance and control.
These situations point to a larger truth: the struggle for freedom now runs through the world’s financial systems. Authoritarians don’t need to shutter a newspaper if they can cut its payroll. They don’t need to outlaw a church if they can starve it of rent.
Venezuela is not an isolated case. In Afghanistan, Roya Mahboob used digital dollars to pay teachers running underground schools for girls under Taliban rule. In Belarus, solidarity funds helping families of political prisoners have relied on cryptocurrency simply because nothing else would clear in time. When the Nigerian government froze the bank accounts of civic groups organizing protests against police brutality, crowdfunding in crypto allowed activists to keep their movement alive.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a strategic fact. In the places where freedom is most embattled, decentralized financial tools have become a frontline instrument of democratic resilience. The speed of transactions allows critical financial support to arrive in minutes rather than weeks. Their resilience makes dollar-denominated transfers harder to freeze outside of captured banking systems. Their privacy protections shield at-risk activists from repressive governments. Their efficiency keeps more of every dollar on mission, avoiding transaction costs that drain scarce resources. And with proper transparency and accountability, they can reinforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and anti-corruption compliance.
We have seen this work firsthand. At the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), we’re pioneering the responsible use of these tools with partners on the front lines. Through audited, dollar-backed stablecoin disbursements, NED can deliver lawful, traceable support faster, more securely, and at lower cost, whether to communities in remote areas with few banking options, or others under severe repression, or to grantees in war zones where traditional banks impose surcharges of up to 50 percent just to access funds.
We also have no illusions about the potential risks. We know how bad actors exploit financial gaps and authoritarian states like North Korea, Russia, and Iran are already using crypto rails to evade sanctions and move money beyond scrutiny. However, the answer is not to abandon the technology. It is to ensure that free societies sets the standards, enforce transparency, and build the compliance infrastructure that keeps these tools lawful, traceable, and open.
But too often, the policy conversations about cryptocurrencies have focused solely on the risks. These technological innovations tend to be seen as challengers to orthodoxies instead of drivers of freedom and autonomy. With the passage of the GENIUS Act and consideration of the CLARITY Act, it is time to consider how these tools can serve U.S. interests and policy goals.
Freedom movements don’t win with hashtags and slogans alone. They win when courage meets capability, and when free nations align their financial tools with their strategic interests and values. The rules for the future of money are being written now. Those who love freedom should be the ones writing them.
Mr. Wilson is president and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy. Mr. Zarate is a board member and treasurer for NED, served as deputy national security advisor and the first-ever assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, is the chair of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Democracies, and was the first independent advisor to Coinbase starting in 2014.
