Freedom Tech Provides Hope Amidst CBDCs

This speech was delivered on June 10, 2026, at the Freedom Tech Summit in Prague, Czechia.

Ahoj. (Hello.)

Proč jsme tady? (Why are we here?)

Is it love? Is it fear? Is it a yearning for freedom?

Whatever reason brings you here, you are all working to build a better future where free people can transact, communicate, and interact without the restrictive shackles that have become all too common in this world.

Yet, while we are gathered here today to break those shackles, governments are hammering away to forge new chains.

These governments are working to build central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.

A CBDC is not just a digital crown, a digital euro, or a digital dollar. It is programmable money. Money that can be turned off. Money that expires. Money that cannot be spent on things the state disapproves of. It is a surveillance system dressed in the language of financial innovation.

At the Human Rights Foundation, we built the CBDC Tracker to reveal this threat in real time.

I encourage you to look at it at hrf​.org/​c​b​d​c​t​r​acker.

There you will see that red means a CBDC is live—deployed, in people’s hands, reshaping what money can and cannot do. And when you look at the map today, there is more red than there was last year. And more is coming. The European Central Bank plans to launch a CBDC by 2029—with a single flip of a switch, 350 million more people will be exposed to CBDCs.

This is not a distant threat. It is not a story about authoritarian governments in faraway places. It is a story about the architecture of money itself—and who controls it. That affects all of us.

When money becomes programmable, the question is no longer just “How much do you have?” It becomes “What are you allowed to do with it?” That is different from the power to tax or the power to inflate. It’s the power to permit.

That distinction matters. Because once that infrastructure exists—once it is built, normalized, and woven into daily life—the conditions that make it dangerous do not need to arrive all at once. They can come gradually. A spending restriction here. An expiration date there. A quiet freeze on the account of someone who said the wrong thing.

That is why we must push back now.

Every privacy tool you ship makes surveillance harder. Every protocol you harden makes control more expensive. Every line of open-source code you commit is a vote cast not in a ballot box that can be rigged, but in transparency that cannot be stopped.

You are building the infrastructure of dissent.

You are building the thing that lets a journalist in Berlin pay a source, without putting his life in danger. You are building the thing that lets a dissident in Tehran receive support from people who love her, without a government in the middle deciding whether that love is permitted. You are building the thing that lets people everywhere experience true freedom.

This work is urgent now, while we can still choose the world we are creating rather than react to the one that was created for us.

So I will ask you again: Why are you here?

I hope the answer is freedom. I hope the answer is: “Because I would rather fight for freedom while I have it than mourn it after it is gone.”

Tracking CBDCs is only half the battle. It’s up to you to keep freedom tech alive.

Děkuji. (Thank you.)