Human Rights Foundation Grants $325,000 to Bitcoin Developers

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has announced a new set of grants via its Bitcoin Development Fund. These grants are geared 'to support censorship--resistant donations, core development, open-source self-custody, e-cash, and global education.'

The HRF launched the Bitcoin Development Fund in 2020 with a goal of making bitcoin a better tool for human rights activists, civil society organizations and journalists around the world. They have since donated over $1.5 million to more than 40 developers and educators in the space.

The largest portion of the grants goes to the BTCPay team. Nicholas Dorier and co will be receiving $100,000 to continue to provide free Bitcoin payment software for businesses and individuals. BTCPay is a open source Bitcoin payment processor that enables anyone to deploy an uncensorable global payment system. HRF partnered with Strike's affiliated nonprofit group for this grant.

$50,000 Bitcoin Development Fund Grants

The HRF will be issuing two separate $50,000 grants towards Bitcoin development. The first will go to Jon Atack for his work on Bitcoin Core. Jon serves a valuable role in code review and testing on the main Bitcoin protocol. The second $50,000 grant will go to Josh Kitman for his work on Fedimint. Josh aims to help bring increased privacy and scalability to Bitcoin via his work on Fedimints.

$25,000 Bitcoin Development Fund Grants

They launched 5 separate $25,000 grants for various projects. The first of these went to Robosats. Robosats is built to allow anyone to privately buy and sell Bitcoin using the Lightning Network. The funding will help Robosats continue their open source development while adding new language and currency support for the project.

The second of these grants went to Leigh Cuen for her work on an upcoming Bitcoin donation guide. This guide will help NGOs, state institutions and activists to use Bitcoin. Leigh is working with the Bitcoin Policy Institute to launch the guide in the upcoming month.

The third grant will be helping Novaya Gazeta continuing their investigative coverage of Russian politics and society. This funding will allow the newspaper to 'explore the intersection of cryptocurrency and human rights in the context of Putin’s war on Ukraine and the resettlement of millions of Ukrainian refugees and Russian exiles.'

The fourth set will be heading to Keith Mukai for his work on Seedsigner. Seedsigner is an open-source tooling that allows anyone to build an offline, air gapped Bitcoin hardware wallet. The funding will help Keith deploy multilanguage support for RTL while expanding the project beyond it's current hardware options.

The final set of $25k grants will head to the Vinteum Initiative. The Vinteum Initiative is a non-profit Bitcoin research center for Latin America. Vinteum's goal is to grow the talent pool of Bitcoin developers from the Brazilian and wider Latin American region. This grant will help support them in their education seminars, fellowships and grants.

The HRF is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law. You can contribute to the Bitcoin Development Fund at HRF.org/DevFund.