Bitcoin Developer Awarded $100,000 Grant to Enhance Payjoin Privacy Tool

Bitcoin developer Ben Allen has been awarded a $100,000 grant by Maelstrom, an investment firm, to advance the development of Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool designed to enhance Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy. The grant, announced on May 20, will support Allen’s work on the Payjoin devkit in collaboration with Dan Gould. Payjoin, first proposed by Nicolas Dorier in 2019, allows both senders and receivers to contribute inputs to a transaction, thereby enhancing privacy and scalability.

The grant, which will be paid monthly over a year in Bitcoin, is managed on a hands-off approach, allowing Allen the freedom to work on what he deems necessary. Maelstrom's chief investment officer and BitMEX crypto exchange co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes emphasized the importance of improving financial privacy in Bitcoin. He noted that even a small amount of Payjoin adoption could disrupt the assumptions used by financial surveillance companies, which often assume that multiple inputs in a Bitcoin transaction belong to the same entity.

Allen will focus on improving Payjoin implementations to make it easier for the feature to be integrated into more wallets. He highlighted that the funding will enable him to work on the project full time, addressing challenges such as the need for the receiver to be online and the complexity of the payment communication flow. Allen is also developing benchmarks and expanding test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code, aiming to simplify the user experience and encourage wider adoption of Payjoin.

Maelstrom is actively seeking candidates with strong track records in Bitcoin privacy projects to support further. The firm believes that Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of all Bitcoin users, not just those who use it directly. Allen's work is expected to have a significant impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem, particularly if popular open-source Bitcoin wallets, such as BitcoinCore, adopt the technology. This would serve as a major indicator of Payjoin's success and its potential to enhance the overall privacy and scalability of Bitcoin transactions.