NEW YORK (March 2, 2021) — The Human Rights Foundation is delighted to announce four new gifts from its Bitcoin Development Fund. This wave of donations will support Bitcoin development, a new open source wallet, a privacy newsletter, and internships for college students to work on Bitcoin software and new user education.
Bitcoin developer Jesse Posner will receive a gift of $25,000 in BTC. Until recently Jesse worked as a key management engineer at Coinbase, and is now today dedicating himself to the free and open source software movement. HRF’s support for Jesse will allow him to to finish his work on adapter signatures and discrete log contracts, which will bolster second-layer technology like the Lightning Network and help lay the foundation for “DeFi” to come to Bitcoin. HRF’s gift will also help Jesse begin research and implementation of new building blocks for key management systems in the post-Taproot era, including Schnorr threshold systems like FROST, which will help users more easily and privately control their funds.
The team behind Muun, an open source bitcoin and lightning wallet available for Android and iPhone, will receive a gift of $25,000 in BTC. This Argentina-based project led by Dario Sneidermanis seeks to make self-custodial bitcoin and lightning use easier and more intuitive than ever before. The Muun wallet can be downloaded here and has been praised widely throughout the industry including by Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey.
Privacy advocate Janine Roem will receive a gift of $10,000 in BTC to support her Bitcoin privacy newsletter. The newsletter which can be joined and read here is a monthly roundup of all news related to privacy in Bitcoin, ranging from new technology to new risks to guides that help individuals protect themselves while using Bitcoin.
Blockchain Commons, an open source cryptography non-profit, will receive a gift of $10,000 to help create a series of Bitcoin-focused internships. These internships will be opportunities for university students to contribute to Bitcoin software development and provide personal onboarding and education about how to use Bitcoin to activists in HRF’s network. This will allow, for example, journalists and dissidents under authoritarian regimes to have personalized assistance on how to, for example, set up a Bitcoin payment processor on their website to allow them to receive donations from anywhere in the world; configure a wallet that they securely control; and sell Bitcoin into fiat safely when necessary to pay for program expenses.
HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund will continue to make gifts throughout 2021. To donate to the fund in Bitcoin or Lightning click here; to donate via Payjoin click here; to donate by credit card click here. To submit a proposal for funding, please email dev.fund@hrf.org.
Launched in May 2020, HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund has previously made gifts to Chris Belcher for Coinswap, Gloria Zhao for Package Memepool Accept, Global Mesh Labs for the Lot49 protocol, Ben Kaufman for Specter Wallet, Openoms for JoinInbox, Evan Kaloudis for Zeus, and Fontaine for Fully Noded.