HRF Bitcoin Development Fund Awards $325,000 In New Grants

12 projects across five continents have received $325,000 in funding from the Human Rights Foundation.

The Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund has announced a new set of grants to go out across the globe to support builders in the industry. 

According to the announcement sent to Bitcoin Magazine, “Areas of focus include Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia.” The grants include:

• $50,000 to Gleb Naumenko for his work on Bitcoin Core, the release of Coinpool, a concept for scaling Bitcoin and for conducting research on SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT and Eltoo as potential Bitcoin scaling solutions.
• $50,000 to Furzy for his work on Bitcoin Core, mainly addressing stability, security and performance features.
• $25,000 to Bitcoin4India for support for community initiatives and local meetups, education, translation projects and support of local artisans.
• $25,000 to Bitcoin Mountain for their building of circular economies, meetups, conferences and training in Cameroon.
• $25,000 to the We Are All Satoshi project, “an Africa-based organization that aims to identify teenage women and men from all religious backgrounds interested in tech and help steer them to contributing to Bitcoin,” which will aid them in development of curriculum, organizing support networks and sponsoring projects.
• $25,000 to Tor relay operator associations to support increased network reliability and performance, as recommended by the Tor Project. The goal is to help support increased network reliability and performance, especially in light of recent DOS attacks, as a key privacy tool used by people around the world.
• $25,000 to Bitcoin Magazine Ukraine to support regular Bitcoin meetups in Kiev, which continue even in the midst of the war — funding will also help support the release of the first print edition of Bitcoin Magazine Ukraine.
• $25,000 to Dusty for his work on Lightning Splicing, which allows nodes to resize Lightning channels, allowing Bitcoin wallets to have “one balance” where the wallet could pay to both legacy on-chain destinations as well as make payments on Lightning. Lightning Splicing has the potential to dramatically improve the user experience on the Lightning Network.
• $25,000 to Raseef 22, the leading independent pan-Arab media covering the 22 Arab countries. Published from Beirut since 2013, its 40 journalists work from the 4 corners of the world to bring relevant coverage of life in the Arabic speaking world, with a focus on freedoms, democracy and human rights, including the social impacts of bitcoin.
• $25,000 to New Belarus, a digital democracy platform that aims to provide the framework for activating direct and representative democracy and preparing a new generation of politicians and democracy-savvy citizens, including programming that will focus on building a bitcoin-based financial infrastructure.
• $15,000 in travel grants to support students, activists, and developers at the Africa Bitcoin Conference, with travel accommodations and flights, allowing men and women from all over Africa to attend and build on adoption in the continent.
• And $10,000 to support bitcoin ++, a Mexico City based Bitcoin developer conference that has a specific privacy focus, with lectures and workshops.

Over the past two years the HRF has introduced grants amounting to $1.8 million in BTC and USD, supporting more than 60 developers, educators and open-source initiatives across the world.

HRF is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law. You can donate at HRF.org/DevFund, while proposals for where that support might go can be submitted to [email protected].