Human Rights Foundation Donates $210,000 to Promote Bitcoin Ecosystem Development

To promote the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has awarded a total of $210,000 in rewards to three Bitcoin Core contributors, two Lightning Network wallet teams, and an Arabic translator.

“This round of donations will focus on Bitcoin Core development, making it easier to run a node, making it harder to Sybil-attack a node, wallet optimizations for emerging markets, privacy improvements for Lightning apps, and expanding Arabic Bitcoin education and translation,” announced Alex Gladstein, HRF’s chief strategy officer.

HRF will award the top amount to Bitcoin Core developers Calvin Kim, Dhruv Mehta, and Abubakar Nur Khalil, who will each receive $50,000.

Kim is currently working on how to extend the Bitcoin base layer with the Utreexo client, and has recently achieved promising results. With this new grant, Kim will go one step further and work on “making Utreexo accessible to end users,” he shared on Twitter. Utreexo is a project being implemented on the Bitcoin blockchain network that will significantly increase the scalability of nodes.

Dhruv Mehta will use the money to boost his project, which has great potential, called Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 324. The proposal seeks to reduce the chances of Sybil attacks on the Bitcoin chain, and Mehta will continue to oversee and improve Bitcoin’s security.

Abubakar Nur Kahlil will build a unique and efficient wallet with the help of other technicians. This wallet will operate in the African country of Nigeria, where citizens also need cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Khalil will work on optimizing the wallet for his home country Nigeria.

The Lightning Network application ecosystem will receive two grants, each totaling $25,000. According to the announcement, Sphinx Chat, a lightning wallet and encrypted messaging service that allows chatting on Lightning, will use the grant to provide a new donation interface for humanitarians and activists. Another lightning wallet, Breez, will use the funds for bounties, add Tor and NextCloud to its platform, and integrate Lightning with Matrix.

Additionally, Arabic_HODL will use the $10,000 grant to continue translating Bitcoin’s technical details (among other things) into Arabic.

From the above, it can be seen that the goal of the Human Rights Foundation is to completely change the world's view of Bitcoin.