This week #Revolut confirmed it handed over customers' passports, verification selfies, home addresses, IBANs and full transaction histories, including #Bitcoin, to a fake government request.
The email came from a real government agency's domain, and Revolut complied because the rules told it to. #FATF rules, transposed into #US, #EU and #UK law, oblige every regulated institution to keep this data and hand it over promptly to any state request, with fines in the millions for delay and none for handing over too much.
Nobody is required to check whether the state behind the request is legitimate. Any exchange, on-ramp or card issuer you use sits under the same rules.
Authoritarian states and their proxies have used these requests for years against critics, donors and businesses. We call it transnational financial repression. This time it reached bitcoiners at scale.
Since 2022 the Open Dialogue Foundation has campaigned before EU regulators for the privacy of payments and asked the Bitcoin industry to join. We were grateful for the support of
,
and a few other bitcoiners. Most others laughed, saying we are losing time or it was not their business.
In 2023 we won a majority in the European Parliament for our safeguards. The closed-door trilogue then removed most of them from the AML Regulation. We did not have enough loud voices from the industry to defend payment privacy, and now not only activists, but also bitcoiners, business people, donors - we all face the hunting of our data at scale.
There is still a chance. In July 2026 OSCE Parliamentary Assembly parliamentarians adopted remedies against the weaponisation of AML/CFT laws and recognised transnational financial repression as a threat to the security of the OSCE area, which covers the US, Canada, Europe and Central Asia.
This would have been impossible without the support of Atlas Network,
and the Reynolds Foundation ( ), who understood the problem at first sight.
Will you keep observing and complaining, or join and make this space safe to use, invest and build in? There is nowhere else to run, if you understand how FATF rules work. If you don’t - happy to explain.
Privacy has to be protected and normalised as a human right. Now, before it is too late.
