$325K in “gifts” from the Human Rights Foundation, who in Bitcoin received them?

The Human Rights Foundation announced its round of “gifts” for Q3 2022. Unfortunately, they are not denominated in sats and BTC as on previous occasions. To compensate, they are the largest donations to date in fiat terms. How did the Human Rights Foundation distribute $325K from the Bitcoin Development Fund? Which projects and developers got much-needed funding to keep fighting the good fight?

This time, the projects chosen by The Human Rights Foundation “focus on censorship-resistant donations, kernel development, open source self-storage, Chaumian e-cash, and global education.” A list similar and also very different from before. “Over the past two years, HRF has allocated more than $1.5 million in BTC and USD to more than 40 developers and educators worldwide,” the press release says.

Let’s see who got HTF’s seal of approval this time.

The Human Rights Foundation’s major gifts

• The first and largest went to “$100,000 to BTCPay, a free and open source Bitcoin payment processor.” What does that have to do with The Human Rights Foundation? Well, “BTCPay enables activists and dissidents to accept uncensorable, unfreezable global payments in a relatively private way using Bitcoin.” HRF can’t take full credit here, “this giveaway is made in partnership with Strike’s affiliated nonprofit organization.”

2/ First announced a few months ago @jackmallers on @osloffthis gift will allow team BTCpay to continue improving one of the world’s best open source BTC donation portals to enable dissidents and journalists to safely accept funds from anywhere and from anyone on earth

— Alex Gladstein 🌋 ⚡ (@gladstein) 6 September 2022

• A big one went to “$50,000 to Jon Atack, a Bitcoin Core developer.” According to GitHub, Jon “began contributing to Bitcoin Core development in March 2019.” He is “currently #10 of the Bitcoin Core contributors with 621 commits merged into Bitcoin Core and a primary focus on code review.” In the past, Atack has received grants for Spiral, Strike and Compass Mining.

Send the future so fast they can’t ban it.

— …::: (@jonatack) 15 January 2017

• Another big of a donation, “$50,000 to Josh Kitman for his work on Fedimint, a Chaumian e-cash solution that aims to bring “Signal to Bitcoin.” This person also won HRF and Stike’s Bounty for the first person to develop a Lightning Network-based e-cash solution? Time will tell. But the Human Rights Foundation covers him with words of praise. “Signal Messenger brought open source p2p encryption to hundreds of millions of people by making certain trade-offs: Fedimint aims to do the same by bringing increased Bitcoin privacy and scalability to the masses.”

BTC price chart for 09/07/2022 on Coinbase | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com

Human Rights Foundation’s smaller gifts

• Here we go. To start the relatively smaller recipients, “$25,000 to Robosats, an open source and private peer to peer Lightning exchange.” Using Tor, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, “Robosats allow anyone to privately buy and sell Bitcoin.” Is this project inspired by the already recognized LNp2pbot? Apparently so, but Robosats take a different approach and make different trade-offs.

5/ Grant #4: $25,000 more @RoboSats for their Lightning-powered fiat-BTC exchange

Robosats is an open source p2p exchange that allows anyone to buy/sell BTC privately using the Lightning Network

Funding will help RoboSats grow into a more practical tool for activists everywhere

— Alex Gladstein 🌋 ⚡ (@gladstein) 6 September 2022

• Another quarter goes to, “$25,000 to Leigh Cuen for her work on a Bitcoin donation guide for non-profits. Leigh’s guide will cover how NGOs, government institutions and activists can use Bitcoin. Sounds interesting. The guide in question was created in collaboration with HRF and the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
• Its political, “$25,000 to Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s leading independent news outlets. Novaya Gazeta is known for its investigative coverage of Russian politics and society.” There are no comments from our side on this.
• A fourth quarter went to, “$25,000 to Keith Mukai, the full-time lead developer working on SeedSigner. SeedSigner allows you to build your own offline, air-gapped, Bitcoin hardware wallet.” Learn more about the project, including how create your own device here.
• The last quarter of an hour went by a project that Bitcoinist announced. “$25,000 to the Vinteum Initiative, a non-profit Bitcoin research and development center dedicated to further supporting Bitcoin developers in Brazil and Latin America.” In our article, we quoted Lucas Ferreira, who explained that the project’s raison d’être is to bring “more geographic diversity to this talent pool, people who will understand the needs of their regions and will keep that in mind when developing Bitcoin.”

That’s right, bitcoin development is in good hands, and those hands are well funded.

Who will the Human Rights Foundation give “gifts” in “Q4? Stay tuned to Bitcoinist to find out.

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