I built this site because I could. I care about this because financial infrastructure is treated as neutral when it isn't, and almost nobody is keeping count. It was inspired by my master's thesis on financial censorship and Bitcoin.
The thesis studied how nonviolent resistance campaigns have used Bitcoin in response to state financial censorship, focusing on the Feminist Coalition's EndSARS protest, the Freedom Convoy's Covid-19 mandate protest, and the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice.
The monitor documents financial censorship. It also argues that open money - Bitcoin in particular - is the most practical fallback available today.
I designed the website myself, but built it entirely with AI assistance. The same is true of the Python code that finds candidate cases. AI helped write the code; I directed the work, designed the system, reviewed the outputs, and approved the functionality myself. The project took about four months to design and build.
Bitcoin appears here because the problem the monitor documents - financial access used as a weapon - has no solution inside the system that created it. Bitcoin is not the only alternative, but it is the most accessible one today, and several organisations in this dataset survived because of it. I wrote about Bitcoin here due to my work in Bitcoin space.
Debankd is maintained by me, myself, and I, i.e. Ville Kokkomäki. But for corrections, removals, source suggestions, or questions send email to: contact@debankd.org. You can also submit a correction or removal request.
The dataset is CC BY-NC 4.0. The code is MIT. The web design is copyrighted. The source code and licence are available on GitHub.