Bitcoin privacy tool Payjoin receives $100K grant from Maelstrom

Bitcoin developer Ben Allen has received a $100,000 grant from investment firm Maelstrom to support the development of Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool aimed at improving Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy.

According to a May 20 announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Maelstrom will finance Allen’s work on his Payjoin devkit alongside Dan Gould. The system allows Bitcoin (BTC) senders and receivers to use batched transactions, with positive implications for scalability and privacy.

Payjoin Developer Kit’s website. Source: Payjoin Dev Kit

Payjoin was first proposed by Nicolas Dorier in 2019 in Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) 78. The core principle behind the system is that both senders and receivers may contribute inputs to a transaction.

“Namely that privacy is enhanced and improved consolidation of transaction outputs is achieved, benefiting scalability,“ the Maelstrom announcement states.

A Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that grantees are paid monthly for a total of $100,000 per year in Bitcoin and Allen’s grant will last one year. There are no concrete milestones and the grant is managed on a hands-off approach:

“We believe grantees may work better with freedom to work on what they wish, rather than being tightly controlled by those who provide the funding.“

Related: Bitcoin privacy will survive despite CoinJoin closure — zkSNACKs CEO

Payjoin: Soon in wallets near you?

Allen will be working on improving Payjoin implementations, with the clear objective of making it possible for the feature to be added to more wallets. He explained that the funding will enable him to work on the project full time.

The announcement points out that the system presents challenges, with the receiver needing to be online and the payment communication flow being more complex than normal non-interactive Bitcoin transactions. Maelstrom’s chief investment officer and BitMEX crypto exchange co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes said that “improving financial privacy in Bitcoin is extremely important.” He added:

“The great thing about Payjoin is that if only a small amount of adoption is achieved, it breaks a key assumption used by financial surveillance companies. The assumption they have is that if a Bitcoin transaction has multiple inputs, all the inputs must all belong to the same entity.“

A Maelstrom representative explained to Cointelegraph that the firm “is keen to support more grantees in the privacy area.” The company is actively seeking candidates with strong track records in Bitcoin privacy projects.

Related: What are privacy coins and how do they differ from Bitcoin?

Enjoy the benefits whether you use it or not

Hayes noted that “Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don’t use it.” Allen said he believes privacy is important for Bitcoin users to enjoy a better experience and control their financial data when using it daily.

Allen told Cointelegraph he is “building out benchmarks to help downstream developers implement Payjoin in individual wallet software as well as expanding test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code.” He explained that encouraging its adoption “is the biggest step we can take for simplifying the experience and encouraging Payjoin adoption by moving the complexities mostly away from the user.”

The Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that “a key metric for Payjoin success would be adoption by popular open source Bitcoin wallets.” “In particular if the BitcoinCore wallet ever adopts it, that would be a huge signal of success,” they added.

Magazine: Big Questions: What did Satoshi Nakamoto think about ZK-proofs?