Bitcoin Developer Awarded $100,000 Grant for Payjoin Development

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. Maelstrom believes that providing grantees with the freedom to work on their projects without stringent controls can lead to more innovative and effective solutions. This approach aligns with Maelstrom's philosophy of fostering a more private and scalable Bitcoin network.

Maelstrom's chief investment officer and former BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes emphasized the importance of financial privacy in Bitcoin. He noted that even partial adoption of Payjoin can disrupt the assumptions used by financial surveillance companies. Hayes highlighted that Payjoin breaks the assumption that multiple inputs in a Bitcoin transaction belong to the same entity, thereby improving privacy for all users, not just those who adopt the technology.

With the support of the grant, Allen will focus on improving Payjoin implementations to make it easier for wallets to integrate the feature. He aims to build benchmarks and expand test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code, simplifying the user experience and encouraging broader adoption. The success of Payjoin will be measured by its adoption in popular open-source Bitcoin wallets, with the BitcoinCore wallet being a significant milestone.

Maelstrom is actively seeking more grantees with strong track records in Bitcoin privacy projects, indicating a continued commitment to supporting privacy-focused developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The firm is keen to support more grantees in the privacy area and is actively seeking candidates with strong track records in Bitcoin privacy projects. This continued support underscores Maelstrom's dedication to advancing privacy and scalability in the Bitcoin network.