Alex Gladstein

Gladstein has worked at the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation (HRF) since 2007.⁠[1]

Gladstein has served as vice president of strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009 and is chief strategy officer of HRF; in this work he has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers and artists.⁠[2]

He recalls that HRF first saw Bitcoin’s potential in 2013, during Ukraine’s protests against Viktor Yanukovych, when Bitcoin got funds to protesters whose accounts had been frozen.⁠[1]

In February 2016 HRF and Silicon Valley’s Forum 280 launched Flash Drives for Freedom, collecting unused flash drives so that defector-led groups could carry foreign films, books and other content into North Korea. Gladstein said the goals were to get more information into the country and to show that the answer to the North Korean dictatorship would be neither military nor diplomatic but people power; he said the campaign had received more than 15,000 drives.⁠[3]

In 2019 he co-authored The Little Bitcoin Book, and he has since frequently written and spoken about why Bitcoin matters for freedom.⁠[4]

On August 21, 2019, Reason released Nick Gillespie’s podcast interview with him, titled “How Bitcoin Is Freeing People in China, Venezuela, Iran, and…America,” which presents his view that cryptocurrency is a human rights issue.⁠[5]

In June 2020 HRF announced a fund to support software developers working on privacy-focused Bitcoin projects, with the first grant going to UK-based developer Chris Belcher for CoinSwap. Gladstein said human rights defenders and reporters around the world faced increasing financial repression and that Bitcoin could be a powerful tool for them.⁠[6]

Called the Bitcoin Development Fund, it supports developers and projects that strengthen the privacy, security and decentralization of Bitcoin and related freedom technologies for human rights defenders working under authoritarian regimes such as Nicaragua, Nigeria, China and Russia.⁠[7]

On February 5, 2021, he published an essay in Reason calling Bitcoin “an escape hatch from tyranny” and “freedom money.” Responding to the economist Paul KrugmanPaul KrugmanPaul Krugman is an economist who was the sole winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on new trade theory and economic geography; after teaching at Yale, MIT, Stanford and Princeton he has been a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center since 2015. He wrote a New York Times column from 2000 to 2024 and has since written mainly on Substack; he appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2020.Open the full entry’s 2017 criticism that Bitcoin had not been shown to help in conducting economic transactions and had no anchor for its value, he argued that people in stable democracies are privileged, while some 4.2 billion people under authoritarian regimes need to save and transact outside the government’s purview.⁠[8]

On October 16, 2021, he appeared on episode 231 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast; topics included universal human rights, authoritarianism, AI’s impact on civil liberties, Edward Snowden and government surveillance, money and Bitcoin, HRF, conflict with China, corporate accountability, and Garry KasparovGarry KasparovGarry Kasparov is a chess player, author and political activist born in Baku in the Soviet Union; in 1985 he became the youngest world chess champion in history, and he played IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997. After retiring in 2005 he turned to political activism against Vladimir Putin’s government and has lived in New York since 2013.Open the full entry and HRF.⁠[9]

On March 10, 2022, Bitcoin Magazine Books released his Check Your Financial Privilege. The book argues that anyone born into a reserve currency such as the euro, yen or pound has financial privilege over the 89% of the world’s population born into weaker systems, and describes Bitcoin use in Nigeria, Cuba and El Salvador.⁠[10]

On April 7, 2022, he moderated a mainstage panel at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami with Farida Nabourema, Yeonmi Park and Fadi Elsalameen on global financial inclusion and Bitcoin as a tool for dissidents, and held a book signing the next day.⁠[11]

On June 1, 2022, some 1,500 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists wrote to the US Congress calling blockchain “a solution in search of a problem” and urging a critical, skeptical approach to the industry.⁠[12]

Twenty human rights leaders from 20 countries then sent their own open letter to Congress calling for responsible Bitcoin legislation, partly in response to that letter; Gladstein was among the signatories.⁠[13]

On February 21, 2023, HRF announced grants of 2 billion satoshis (about $475,000) from the Bitcoin Development Fund to 10 projects, with a focus on Africa and Southeast Asia, bringing its total since early 2020 to more than $2.2 million for over 70 developers, educators and open-source initiatives. Gladstein said financial freedom is a human right.⁠[14]

On April 14, 2023, his Hidden Repression: How the IMFInternational Monetary FundThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international financial institution conceived at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, whose Articles entered into force in 1945 and which began operations on March 1, 1947; headquartered in Washington, it has 191 member countries and has been led by Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva since October 2019.Open the full entry and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development was released, with a foreword by Jeff Booth. The book argues that the loans and structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank pushed poor countries into debt traps and forced them to produce goods for Western consumption, a history he describes as neocolonial exploitation.⁠[15]

In June 2025, at the Bitcoin Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., he said Bitcoin is “bad for dictators” and that self-custodied Bitcoin cannot be frozen or hyperinflated away by governments.⁠[1]

In October 2025 he published “Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money” in the Journal of Democracy (Volume 36, Number 4, Johns Hopkins University Press), drawing on examples from Nigeria, Cuba, Russia, Togo and elsewhere to argue that Bitcoin helps dissidents transact freely and securely where financial systems are used to surveil and punish.⁠[16]

He recounts in a July 2026 essay that after the open-source personal agent software OpenClawOpenClawOpenClaw is open-source personal AI assistant software created by Peter Steinberger: users run its gateway on their own computer and give instructions to an AI agent through chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, and the agent calls tools to carry out tasks. The project was released in November 2025 under the name Warelay, was later renamed Clawdbot and then Moltbot, settled on the name OpenClaw in January 2026 and quickly went viral, while drawing criticism over security risks such as public exposure, malicious plugins, and prompt injection; as of October 2026 it is stewarded by the nonprofit OpenClaw Foundation and open-sourced under the MIT License.Open the full entry went viral in late January 2026, HRF shifted from mainly studying how dictators use AI to helping human rights activists use it, and set up an in-person Agent Camp with Finite to train human rights defenders.⁠[17]

His writing and views have appeared in outlets including The Atlantic, the BBCBBCThe BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster. Its predecessor was the British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922, and since 1927 it has been established under a Royal Charter. It provides television, radio, and online services in the UK, is funded mainly by the television licence fee, and broadcasts worldwide in multiple languages through BBC World Service.Open the full entry, CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry, WIRED and The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry; he has briefed the European Parliament and the US State Department and lectures on freedom in the digital age at Singularity UniversitySingularity UniversitySingularity University is a technology and leadership education organization founded by Peter H. Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. It offers short executive programs, organizational training and support for entrepreneurs, focusing on rapidly developing technologies and their social and business implications.Open the full entry.⁠[18]

He lives in the San Francisco area.⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/gladstein (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

Human Rights Foundation: Official website: https://hrf.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

Oslo Freedom Forum: Official website: https://oslofreedomforum.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]