FUNDING | Human Rights Foundation Awards 1.3 Billion Satoshis to 22 Global Bitcoin Projects, 2 Are African

In Q4 2025, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) awarded 1.3 billion Satoshis through its Bitcoin Development Fund to support 22 projects building censorship-resistant financial tools, open-source Bitcoin infrastructure, and education initiatives around the world.

The grants span Bitcoin Core development, mining decentralisation, Lightning infrastructure, privacy tools, and grassroots education, with a strong focus on regions facing financial repression and authoritarian control across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

FUNDING | Human Rights Foundation Grants 1 Billion Satoshis (10 $BTC) to Support 23 Global Bitcoin Projects – 4 Are African Projects

Bitcoin Decentralisation & Network Infrastructure

• Stratum V2 (Stratum Reference Implementation) (USA / Global) – Performance testing, integration, and maintenance of the mining protocol that lets individual miners build block templates independently of mining pools.
• Braidpool (Global) – A peer-to-peer, open-source mining pool that reduces centralisation and improves censorship resistance by rethinking how blocks and rewards are coordinated.

Education & Community Development

• Open Money, Closed Access (OMCA) (Global) – Builds Bitcoin-based financial tools for low-cost, private transactions in regions affected by conflict, surveillance, and restricted banking access.
• Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line (Global) – Hands-on curriculum teaching developers how Bitcoin works from the ground up using real command-line tools.
• Bitcoin Indonesia & Bitcoin House Bali (Indonesia) – Expanding workshops and meetups to grow Bitcoin literacy and real-world adoption across Indonesia.
• The Bitcoin Learning Center (Thailand) – Training students from Southeast Asia to use Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant financial tool.

Bitcoin Core & Protocol Development

• Devgitotox (France) – Core contributor improving Bitcoin’s reliability and security.
• Stratospher (Spain) – Bitcoin Core developer focused on long-term protocol robustness and network resilience.
• Sovereign Engineering (USA) – Building decentralised applications across Bitcoin, Nostr, and Ecash to protect civil liberties.
• OpenSats Initiative, Inc. (USA) – Non-profit funding open-source Bitcoin and freedom-tech development through transparent grants.

LIST | 2 Out of the 14 Recipients of the Latest HRF Bitcoin Development Grants are African Projects

Lightning & Developer Training

• Africa Free Routing Lightning Developer Bootcamp (Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso & Pan-Africa) – Expanding Lightning developer training across Africa to build local, censorship-resistant payment infrastructure.
• Programming Lightning (Global) – Self-paced Lightning Network development courses helping grow the global builder community.

Freedom Tech & Privacy Tools

• Zapstore (Global) – A decentralised app store on Nostr enabling censorship-resistant distribution of software.
• Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) (USA) – Improves Lightning security by separating key management for self-custody users.
• Vexl (Czech Republic) – Peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading app that enables private, KYC-free acquisition of bitcoin.
• ngx_l402 by Dhananjay Purohit (India) – Web server module enabling censorship-resistant Bitcoin payments for websites and APIs.
• BTCPay Server (Global) – Self-hosted, permissionless payment processor protecting activists and nonprofits from financial censorship.
• Bitika (Kenya) – Expanding Bitcoin access through M-PESA, making self-custody and Lightning payments easier for Kenyans.

HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund continues to back the builders and educators who are quietly strengthening the foundations of a permissionless, censorship-resistant financial system — ensuring Bitcoin remains usable for people living under restrictive political and economic conditions.

LIST | 4 African Projects, Out of 20 Globally, Among the Latest Recipients of Bitcoin Development Fund Grants by Human Rights Foundation (HRF)

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