HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund Round Raises $210k for Bitcoin Projects
Six Bitcoin projects will receive funds from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) to propel their growth. The Bitcoin Development Fund’s latest round totals $210,000 and is directed to three Bitcoin Core contributors, two Lightning Network wallet teams, and an Arabic translator.
HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund
The donations for this round, including the support from Anthony Pompliano’s Bitcoin Pizza Day sales and Cygni Capital, were led by Jaewoo Cho, assistant professor at Hansung University and an anonymous crypto investor, RenoHQ.
Calvin Kim, Dhruv Mehta, and Abubakar Nur Kahlil, Bitcoin core contributors, will each be awarded $50,000; $25,000 will be picked up by the Breez and Sphinx wallet teams, and Arabic_HODL will get $10,000.
Kim will make use of the funds for Utreexo, a node-scaling project that takes Bitcoin’s history of transactions and displays them in a kilobyte of data, lowering the time and effort required to bootstrap the Bitcoin’s backbone node software.
Seeking a Global Reach
Based on Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 318, Mehta will keep working on security for Bitcoin to limit vectors for Sybil attacks on Bitcoin nodes. In his home country Nigeria, where Bitcoin’s acceptance is growing in response to policy bribery and capital restriction, Kahlil will work on a wallet purpose-built.
Sphinx Chat, a wallet and encrypted message service for Lightning Network users that enables them to chat through the network, will utilize its grants to create a directory for its users to connect with humanitarian activists.
Breez, another Lightning Network wallet, will utilize its money to develop its encrypted chat capabilities and improve node backup support.
Meanwhile, Arabic _HODL will keep up its work of translating Bitcoin content into Arabic.
Bitcoin Development Funds A Year Later
It may be the HRF’s diversified and worldwide round with recipients from Korea, Nigeria, the Middle East, and others. Bitcoin developers, journalists, and other community members were given grants last year, and over $800,000 has been granted in Bitcoin to 18 beneficiaries and projects since its start in May last year.
Also heavily donated to bitcoin developers and other community members in the past year were Square Crypto, BitMEX, Kraken, Gemini, and other Bitcoin and crypto companies. These grants can be a financial lifeline for coders that previously have been free to work on Bitcoin’s software for an open-source ecosystem, like Bitcoin.
In March this year, HRF received a wave of donations for the Bitcoin Development Fund. These donations supported Bitcoin development, a privacy newsletter, an open-source wallet, new user education, and internships for students.
Notably, all funds to the Bitcoin Development Fund in USD or BTC are used to improve the Bitcoin network. 95% of the funds go directly to the chosen developers, while the remaining 5% support HRF’s human rights advocacy mission.
