Human Rights Foundation Grants 5 BTC To Bitcoin Projects

The latest round of gifts from HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund focuses on software and community development, design, translation, and censorship monitoring.

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) will award a total of 5 BTC in the latest round of gifts from its Bitcoin Development Fund.

Over the past two years, HRF has allocated more than $1.2 million worth of grants to over 30 developers and educators around the world. Proposals for support can be submitted over email, while gifts can be made at their website.

The Q2 2022 round focuses on Bitcoin-related projects in software and community development, design, translation, and censorship monitoring.

The Africa Bitcoin Conference will receive the round’s largest gift, 1 BTC. The 100 million satoshis will help support Bitcoin builders and educators from the continent presenting new ideas as well as holding networking events and open dialogues with local businesses.

The event will be the first major Bitcoin conference to take place in Africa since 2019, HRF said, and it is being organized by a team led by Togolese human rights advocate Farida Nabourema and Senegalese Lightning engineer Fodé Diop.

While only one project will receive a full bitcoin, several initiatives will be supported with half a coin.

Venezuelan Bitcoin developer Francisco Calderon will receive 50 million satoshis to continue working on lnp2pbot, a non-custodial peer-to-peer (P2P) Telegram bot that allows users to trade BTC using the Lightning Network.

In another Lightning-related grant, researcher Rene Pickhardt will receive the same amount for his open-source work on Bitcoin’s second-layer scaling network. Pickhardt has been an important contributor to Lightning through education, research, and identification of security vulnerabilities, and the funding will support his continued dedication in the space.

Ruben Somsen and Dhruv Mehta will also together receive 50 million satoshis for their work on spacechains, a Bitcoin sidechain where any user can compete to add a hash of the recent statechain block into a transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain. Somsen and Mehta’s work form the foundation for a permissionless framework that enables anyone to create their own spacechain.

In addition to developers, media outlets will also receive funding in the round. HRF will partner up with Paxful to gift three media outlets worldwide with half a bitcoin each to help them expand their coverage of bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption, the rise of central bank digital currency (CBDC), and government targeting of dissidents through the banking system. Recipients include El Toque from Cuba, The Daily Maverick from South Africa, and Democratic Voice of Burma from Myanmar.

The final recipient getting 0.5 BTC is Netblocks. HRF said it would fund the global internet monitor to study the impact of government restrictions on the Bitcoin protocol and surrounding mechanisms that facilitate access to digital currency. The grant is aimed at helping Netblocks keep working at the intersection of digital rights, cybersecurity and internet governance and take the first step towards extending its public interest research and reporting to cover emergent threats to connectivity that impact the global Bitcoin network.

Paulo Sacramento will receive a quarter of a bitcoin to work on the Bitcoin Design Guide, a project that seeks to make non-custodial Bitcoin applications more intuitive and accessible. Sacramento will be updating the “Getting To Know Your Users” page of the guide with information found in previous user experience (UX) research, as well as identifying, defining and structuring an action course for what and how the UX of Bitcoin applications can be improved, HRF said.

Finally, Bitcoin Pakistan will receive 0.25 BTC to help increase the availability of Bitcoin content and resources in the Urdu language, a top-20 world language spoken by more than 60 million people worldwide.