From Freedom Money to Digital Financial Authoritarianism: Cryptocurrency, Protests, and Surveilled Openness in Belarus

During the 2020-2021 protests, the Belarus Solidarity Foundation (BYSOL) made cryptocurrency payments to avoid state financial surveillance through conventional banking channels. Belarus is not the only case where cryptocurrency is used as a workaround during politically salient events. When the Central Bank of Nigeria froze accounts tied to the 2020 #EndSARS protest organizers, protestors turned to cryptocurrency. Bailey et al. (2024) argue that cryptocurrency is resistance money: through peer-to-peer, pseudonymous settlement, it moves value without passing through the banks and payment processors a state can freeze or seize, whose privacy and censorship resistance reinforce each other. If cryptocurrency escapes the pressure points of conventional finance, whether for political reasons or as a threat to monetary stability (Ba and Şen 2024), authoritarian regimes should ban it as a means of payment, trade, and value storage. Many authoritarian regimes do not. Instead, they legalize and license cryptocurrency, aligning domestic rules with global Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards, which require states to register virtual-asset service providers (VASPs) and enforce customer identification, transaction monitoring, and information sharing. Therefore, I argue that by governing the VASPs, or operators through which cryptocurrency must be acquired, exchanged, and converted, the state gains what Mann (1984; 2008) calls infrastructural power, or the capacity to penetrate society and implement its policies and decisions throughout its territory. Infrastructural power over cryptocurrency is not in itself authoritarian. Customer identification and reporting serve financial crime prevention, consumer protection, taxation, and market integrity—the same objectives they serve in conventional finance. However, the arrangement crosses into digital authoritarianism, the use of digital technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate populations (Polyakova and Meserole 2019), under what I term surveilled openness: when a legally open cryptocurrency market is organized for observation and political use beyond what ordinary financial regulation requires, and without effective structural limits on that use. Following Pearson (2024), I treat the authoritarian character of such an arrangement as a property of how it is built rather than of who builds it or what they intend. I develop this argument through a theory-testing process tracing of Belarus, which operates a legally open and licensed cryptocurrency market with a documented episode of opposition-linked cryptocurrency use and a traceable regulatory response between 2017 and 2024. The trace finds that Belarus constructed surveilled openness by retaining a legal cryptocurrency channel after BYSOL publicly used cryptocurrency and moved beyond standard financial regulation, by building a wallet-address register accessible to security and investigative bodies and mandating that exchanges run through domestic operators. The inference is contributory, as the trace establishes that this mechanism operated in the case and did causal work in producing the shift from ordinary infrastructural power to surveilled openness. This paper makes three contributions. First, it extends the digital-authoritarianism literature beyond information and communication technologies to financial infrastructure by introducing the term surveilled openness. Second, it extends Mann’s concept of infrastructural power to cryptocurrency. Third, it shows a causal link between politically salient events and the shift from benign infrastructural power to surveilled openness.