The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), the blockchain payment firm Fedi, along with the Brooks School Tech Policy Institute of Cornell University, has revealed the launch of a two-year empirical research collaboration to understand how Americans perceive financial privacy, the privacy trade-offs that they are willing to make, and how public policy shapes both user patterns as well as developer choices.
With the recent spotlight being placed upon the use of data and the level of clarity regarding digital transactions, the new initiative aims to pair the nationwide survey with qualitative interviewing of users and developers in the United States. It is hoped that this move can introduce empirical analysis to the discussion in the wake of enforcement action and the proposed U.S. structure for the cryptocurrency market.
Brooks School Tech Policy Institute from Cornell University will act as the lead academic institution to offer research expertise to the project, while Fedi’s strength would be product usage and user behavior insights. BPI’s focus area for the project would be “Policy/Communication intersections to help make sense of regulatory signals and their effects on adoption and trust of Financial Privacy Tools.”
The first of four semi-annual reports is expected to be published in April 2026 and will continue through 2027. The reports will give a longitudinal perspective on changing attitudes toward privacy, regulation, and financial technology use in a rapidly changing digital economy that continues to shift in a manner that affects privacy and financial technology.
Context: Privacy Tools and Regulatory Debate
Meanwhile, public awareness of data collection practices and concerns over personal privacy have been growing, and it has been found that a considerable proportion of American adults feel concerned about the use of their personal data by the government and corporate institutions. The current study emerges in this context of concern over personal data use.
Within the cryptocurrency industry, the development of privacy-enabling software and open-source developer efforts has been challenged from a regulatory perspective, including through criminal charges against the developers of non-custodial privacy solutions. This trend of criminal charges and the like has heightened fears that the development of privacy-oriented software could be placed under the risk of enforcement even without the ability to control users’ funds.
This new study hopes to close this gap by providing information that can help Americans better understand the trade-offs they make between privacy, security, and regulatory issues regarding what are now all too common digital financial transactions. This new collaboration between the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Fedi, and Cornell University is a major step towards a more informed discussion of privacy issues as they relate to finances that are based upon facts rather than speculation. This new study hopes to provide information to policymakers, to technologists, and to the public at large about the trade-offs Americans are making regarding privacy as it relates to finances by studying user views over a period of two years.
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