The Human Rights Foundation Awarded All 11 Bitcoin Development Bounties

• In the summer of 2023, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) launched a Bitcoin Bounty program offering 11 bounties to fund developers creating tools for activists fighting authoritarianism. The bounties aimed to improve UX, enhance privacy, and open-source closed systems, with a deadline of December 31, 2024.

"We are excited to announce that every single bounty was claimed and that the resulting tools and upgrades are now empowering human rights activists daily across popular apps such as BlueWallet, Zeus, Stack Wallet, Iris, Coracle, Keeper, Bull Bitcoin, Cake Wallet, and more," announced the organization.

The bounties were awarded to the following projects, developers, and contributors:

1. Open-Sourcing the Bitcoin Design Guide (2 BTC) bounty was claimed by CypherStack for porting the Bitcoin UI Kit from Figma to an open-source Penpot project.
2. Serverless Payjoin (1.5 BTC) bounty was split into two parts. Dan Gould received 1 BTC for the development of the Serverless Payjoin specification (Payjoin v2). Dan Gould, Spacebear, and Bull Bitcoin have split 0.5 BTC for implementing Payjoin into the Bull Bitcoin wallet.
3. End-to-End encrypted Nostr group chats (2 BTC). Marti Malmi received 1 BTC for incorporating encrypted group chat functionality into the Iris Nostr client. Vitor Pamplona, hodlbod, and Paul Miller split another 1 BTC for their work on NIP-17, which allows users to encrypt and share Nostr messages in a way that can be recognized across different Nostr clients.
4. Silent Payments (1 BTC) bounty was awarded to cygnet3 and Sosthene for contributing to critical libraries for Silent Payments, and delivering Dana Wallet, a Flutter app for facilitating Silent Payments donations. This bounty code is fully integrated into Cake Wallet, while several other major wallets, such as Wasabi, BlueWallet, and Bitbox, have incorporated partial functionality.
   1. Dana Wallet v0.2.0 was released back in December, marking "the first non-alpha release" for the project.
5. Human-Readable Offers (1 BTC) bounty was awarded to Stephen DeLorme, Chad Welch, and Evan Kaloudis for Twelve Cash and its integration into Zeus Wallet.
6. Self-custodial mobile Lightning Address (1 BTC) bounty was claimed by Evan Kaloudis for integrating the functionality to Zeus Wallet.
7. Mobile Border Wallets (2 BTC) bounty was awarded to Bitcoin Tribe wallet developers. They also built a React Native library for making it easier for other wallets to integrate this feature.
8. Easy Mobile Multisig (1 BTC) bounty was reaped by Bitcoin Keeper project, enabling users to set up an easy 2-of-3 multisig to secure and manage their coins.
9. FROST Multisig Wallet (1 BTC). The bounty was awarded to CypherStack for Stack Wallet, which enables dynamic multisig using FROST, allowing users to modify signer sets without moving funds.
10. Cashu upgrades (2 BTC) bounty was split between the developers of eNuts wallet, Minibits wallet, Proxnut, and Cashu-TS restore functionality.
11. BIP-47 expansion (0.5 BTC) bounty was awarded to BlueWallet for implementing BIP-47 support.

"We learned a lot through this process and look forward to doing similar things in the future. There’s so so much to be gained from mixing political dissidents with developers!" said Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at The Human Rights Foundation.

• Today, the HRF also announced the launch of its first AI program. The program aims to monitor and expose the use of AI by autocrats as a tool of repression and to support open-source AI tools for dissidents, especially those laboring under tyranny. Learn more about it here.

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