Jack Dorsey donates $10 million to fund bitcoin development
Jack Dorsey creator, co-founder and chairman of Twitter and co-founder and CEO of Square will take the stage at the Bitcoin 2021 convention.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is proving how serious he is about bitcoin and the future of social networking with a $10 million donation to non-profit OpenSats, which he says is 100% of the funds to develop both. In other words, they are saying that they are not taking a cut for themselves.
Dorsey shared the donation — $5 million of which is earmarked to fund the development of a social protocol called Nostr — at Nostr itself earlier today. After being developed by a pseudonymous creator known only as @Fiatjaf, the network, or protocol as it is more correctly called, exploded to 16 million users, of which 500,000 daily when they created a way for software developers to integrate bitcoin payments into in their applications.
Before leaving Twitter for TK, Dorsey had conceived and invested $13 million in a similar open-source social protocol that allows users to move profiles between competitors, now developed by a team called Bluesky. Although he had previously given @FiatJaf 14 bitcoin worth just over $200,000 at the time of the donation, this latest infusion appears to level the playing field and remove any sense that he’s picking favorites in his mission to outperform Twitter.
“$10 million to OpenSats to fund the development of bitcoin and nostr,” Dorsey shared on Nostr. “$5 million of it dedicated to nostr!”
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based OpenSats received its 501 © (3) non-profit status in 2021, according to the non-profit data website Charity Navigator. Most of the data on nonprofits that Charity Navigator provides, such as how much of historical donations have been used for the nonprofit’s actual mission compared to the cost of running the organization, is unavailable, as OpenSats provided reduced paperwork required for organizations with less than $200,000 in revenue annually.
As part of Dorsey’s donation, OpenSats says @Fiatjaf and other Nostr users named with the pseudonym NVK will join a committee to help evaluate projects. NVK and a user identified as Gigi join the board.
OpenSat’s website describes the organization’s mission to “support and maintain a sustainable ecosystem of funding for free and open source projects and contributors, particularly Bitcoin
The organization has previously funded 21 teams, including the Bitcoin Policy Institute, which just hosted an invitation-only event in DC that drew attendees from Capitol Hill, and the BTCPay server, a payment processor that hosts the people who use it and the Tor Project, which develops Tor -the browser used by both authorities and criminals to project their identity. The funds include an operating budget to help run the nonprofit and a legal defense fund to help open source developers in court. It’s unclear if this is the same legal defense fund Dorsey said he would create to help pay the legal expenses of bitcoin developers who are being sued for their work.
