OpenSats' 2024 Year in Review

Twenty-twenty-four. What a year! A lot has happened in the past 12 months, and just like last year, we want to take the opportunity to pause, reflect, and share our year in review. We want to look back at the announcements we made, share an update regarding the donations we received, and give an overview of how we allocated our funds. After that we will share updates to our grantee statistics and provide an outlook of what the next year might bring.

• Announcements
• Donations
• Allocation
• Grantees
• Outlook

Before we dive into the various graphs and numbers, let us spend a minute to remind everyone—and most importantly ourselves—why we are doing what we are doing. Steve Jobs once said, "I'm convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar." And indeed, giving grants to the right projects at the right time—and doing it fairly and properly—is a surprisingly hard problem.

Why set out to solve this problem in the first place? Why go through the trouble of creating a non-profit entity? Why spend countless hours reviewing grant applications, commits, reports, pull requests, and other software artifacts? Why bother with open-source grants at all? Shouldn't this problem be solved by companies, or direct crowd funding, or the state?

From the beginning, the vision of OpenSats was to create a sustainable foundation that provides consistent funding for free and open-source projects, especially those who make bitcoin flourish. We don't want to be dependent on quarterly profits nor on funding from the state, which is why we chose a public charity as a vehicle.

As mentioned in our mission statement, we believe that we can help make bitcoin more accessible, robust, secure, and decentralized. Further, we believe that the projects we support have the potential to revolutionize the way we think about individual sovereignty and liberty—values that we hold in high regard. We want to operate with as little overhead as possible, which is why we don't take a cut from donations. And we don't want any one person or small group to have control over funding or organizational decisions, which is why we have a 9-person board that is the final arbiter of all decisions.

We don't claim to have all the answers, and we don't claim that what we are doing is frictionless or perfect. We are bound to make mistakes, and we will always be prone to false positives (funding projects that aren't as fruitful as we thought they would be) as well as false negatives (not funding projects that should receive funding). We strive to gradually and continually improve our processes, and we hope to get better at what we are doing with every passing year. That said, we are pleased to see that our structure and processes are working, and we believe this year in review is a testament to that.

Announcements

At the beginning of the year, we announced long-term support for René Pickhardt and 0xB10C, two researchers/developers with a proven track record of doing important work related to bitcoin infrastructure. Soon after, we announced long-term support for Bruno Garcia, another developer that qualifies as a load-bearing internet person by our estimation. In May Shashwat Vangani joined our roster of LTS grantees, followed by Calle in June, and Jason Donenfeld & Jon Atack in September. The last two long-term support grants in 2024 were awarded to Dusty Daemon and m1sterc001guy, as announced in October and November, respectively. This brings the total number of grantees receiving long-term support from our General Fund to 18, adding to the 9 announced in 2023 (Marco, Josi, Sjors, Vasil, Gleb, Matt, Will, Furszy, and Tobin).

In March we announced the expansion of our LTS program to provide long-term support for nostr developers, which we promptly awarded to PabloF7z, Stuart Bowman, and hzrd149 in April, William Casarin aka jb55 in June, Yuki Kishimoto, Hodlbod, and fiatjaf in July, Kieran, Vitor, Daniele, and Alex Gleason in August, Mike Dilger in September, and Greenart7c3 in October. In addition to these nostr LTS grants, we announced 5 waves of nostr grants—in July, August, September, November, and December—giving a total of 35 grants to some of the most impactful projects in the nostr ecosystem. We also shared some highlights of #nostrdesign and recently committed to doubling down on nostr.

In addition to these LTS and nostr grants, we announced 5 waves of bitcoin grants, giving short- and medium-term grants to 37 high-impact open-source projects in the bitcoin space. We announced these waves of grants in February, June, July, September, and October, respectively. In July we also announced the launch of the OpenSats Education Initiative, ensuring that one of the key aspects of our mission is made explicit: education and outreach about freedom tech in general, and bitcoin in particular. The launch of our education initiative was a great success, with dozens of education-specific applications received, and 13 high-impact educational initiatives funded, as announced in July, September, and November, respectively. From the prestigious Satoshi Nakamoto Institute to the international Mi Primer Bitcoin to the student-focused Summer of Bitcoin, we are proud to have been able to move the needle in regard to worldwide freedom tech education.

We hope that educated users will be able to use bitcoin and other freedom tech privately, securely, and in a way that empowers them, as opposed to empowering the advertisement and surveillance machinery that powers most of the web today. We are proud to support projects that ensure that users can have a certain level of privacy and security, such as GrapheneOS and The Tor Project. The former received a sizable grant from us last year; the latter received a grant from us this year. Strengthening network privacy with Tor is crucial, as is the development and maintenance of WireGuard. We deeply believe that everyone should be able to explore and use the internet privately and securely and that privacy and free speech must be defended online through free software and open networks.

Bitcoin is one of the most powerful open networks to date, and we believe that this will continue to be the case for decades to come. By renewing our commitment to bitcoin, we want to make explicit that which should go without saying: we are here to support free and open-source projects that help bitcoin flourish, especially those that don't have a clear path towards direct monetization. Protocol development is an area that will be reliant on grants for the foreseeable future, which is why we will continue to support Bitcoin Core developers—whether it’s seasoned veterans or up-and-coming contributors, as announced in August. If you are a developer who wants to quit your soul-sucking fiat job to work on freedom tech, don’t hesitate to apply for funding.

Our support for these open-source developers and initiatives is only possible because of donors like you. We want to express our deep gratitude to everyone who donated to our funds as well as to our operations budget. If you like what we do and want to support our work, please consider making a donation. Thank you.

Donations

In 2024 we received 929 individual donations for a total sum of $23.6M. The largest three were a generous $1,000,000 gift from the Reynolds Foundation, an incredibly generous $21M donation from #startsmall, and an anonymous donation of $1,000,000 made in bitcoin directly.

As announced at the beginning of the year, OpenSats is to receive recurring donations from Bitwise Bitcoin ETF profits, along with Brink and the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund. This was followed by a recurring donation commitment from Build Asset Management, which we announced at the end of the second quarter, as well as a recurring commitment announced by Cathie Wood, who pledged to donate a fixed percentage of ARK Invest’s revenue to open-source contributors in perpetuity.

We hope to receive multiple commitments of this kind from various entities, as the mission and philosophy of OpenSats is to support bitcoin infrastructure for decades to come, which is why we launched our long-term support program and aim to be a low-time preference, long-term thinking organization. If you are in a position to make such a commitment, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

In terms of amounts received, we are happy to report that we received higher amounts via bitcoin directly overall, with over half a million dollars ($ 526,044) received via our “donate with bitcoin” button on our website. This is about 4x as much as we received via fiat payment rails ($ 133,050)—excluding the large donations mentioned above. The ratio of on-chain to off-chain donations stayed about the same as last year, with ~70% of bitcoin payments made using the Lightning Network. In terms of number of donations, bitcoin rails continue to dominate.

The vast majority of donations (~80%) went to our General Fund, with the remainder split about evenly between The Nostr Fund and our Operations Budget. In terms of amounts, around ~95% of money donated by the general public is directed towards our General Fund.

Allocation

The purpose of our two funds is to support free and open-source projects that are aligned with our mission. The Nostr Fund is dedicated towards nostr projects, a protocol that is just coming out of its infancy. The General Fund is dedicated towards all other free and open-source projects and contributors, especially bitcoin-related projects and projects that help bitcoin flourish.

As of December 2024, we have allocated over $12M in grants from the General Fund, and close to $9M in grants from The Nostr Fund. In terms of money allocated year-over-year this is an increase of 67% on the nostr side, and 81% on the bitcoin side. When looking at total allocation in USD terms, our two funds are at ~89% and ~52% allocated, respectively.

As mentioned in last year’s report, we suspect that the distinction between “bitcoin” and “nostr” will blur over time, as nostr matures and is integrated into a variety of bitcoin software across the stack. This coalescing is already happening, especially on the eCash front. Are Cashu addresses a Lightning thing, a bitcoin thing, or a nostr thing? Are wallets that use nostr for social payments nostr clients, or bitcoin wallets? And what about peer-to-peer exchanges that use nostr to publish their order books? Various concepts and technologies are currently merging, and we expect this cross-pollination of ideas to continue.

With all that said, nostr is still a young network, which is why we will continue to fund experimental and exploratory projects from our nostr fund. Before we dive into the nostr fund in more detail, let’s have a look at our General Fund and what projects we funded in 2024.

Bitcoin: General Fund

Out of the ~$23M donated towards our General Fund during the lifetime of the fund, we have allocated ~$12M towards free and open-source projects so far. In terms of gross amounts the top five categories that we gave grants to in 2024 are Bitcoin Core, Lightning, eCash, Education, and Privacy.

Our support for Bitcoin Core is mostly constituted of long-term support grants for maintainers and developers. As mentioned in the announcements section above, 0xB10C, Bruno, and Jon mark this year's addition to our LTS roster. We also gave grants to contributors who test and review Bitcoin Core.

On the Lightning side, we are proud to support efforts regarding Splicing, Bolt12, and Scaling Lightning, as well as projects such as Validating Lightning Signer, Lampo, smaug, BLAST, Pickhardt Payments, NLightning, LNP Test Framework, and two self-custodial Lightning wallets with Blitz and Blixt. We are also supporting two Lightning researchers with long-term support grants, namely Matt Morehouse and René Pickhardt.

Ecash is gaining in both momentum and importance, at least in part due to the success and proliferation of nostr. We expect this to continue, which is why we gave long-term support grants to Calle for his work on Cashu, as well as m1sterc001guy for his work on the Fedimint Lightning Gateway. In addition to these long-term support grants, we gave grants to Gonuts, eNuts, Minibits, Nutmix, Nutshell, Macadamia, and npub.cash.

Grants from our Education Initiative went to the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, Mi Primer Bitcoin, Summer of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Jungle, Bitcoin Indonesia, Deciphering Bitcoin, Satsie's Pocket Guides, Free Routing Africa, BOB Spaces, BTC Map, Yes Bitcoin Haiti, Entropy Bitcoin Education, and Bitcoin 4all.

Privacy is an absolute necessity for an open society in the electronic age, as Eric Hughes so beautifully put it. In addition to long-term support for Wireguard and a grant for The Tor Project, we are proud to have given grants to various projects that enhance privacy across all layers of the stack.

The remaining grants from the General Fund were given to BDK, Bitaxe, Braidpool, BTCPay Server, Clams, Cove, dlcdevkit, El Tor, Fedimint, Floresta, Krux, Krux-Installer, Labelbase, LNbits, Raspiblitz. satsigner, secp256k1.swift, StratumV2, Utreexo, and Vexl.

You can read more about these projects in the respective announcements published in February, June, July, September, October, and December.

Nostr: The Nostr Fund

Out of the ~$10M donated towards The Nostr Fund since its inception, we have allocated ~$8.9M as of December 2024. This means that our nostr fund is 89% allocated in USD terms, with the majority of grants still going to kind1 client projects, as was the case last year. However, we definitely saw “other stuff” on the rise this year, with nostr-based app stores, P2P trading systems, chat clients, and even website frameworks gaining traction. Media hosting and the integration of eCash are trends that we keep a close eye on too, and it’s fantastic to see that custom feeds via Data Vending Machines (DVMs)—something that was pure experimentation last year—are now integrated and ready for prime-time in multiple clients. This shift to “other stuff” is apparent in our 2024 allocation statistics as well:

As mentioned in the announcements section, we introduced long-term support for nostr developers in March 2024. Consequently, around ~35% of The Nostr Fund is allocated towards our LTS grantees: Pablo, Stuart, hzrd, Will, Yuki, Hodlbod, fiatjaf, Kieran, Vitor, Daniele, Alex, Mike, and Greenart.

In addition to these LTS grants we gave grants to the following nostr projects this year: 0xchat, alphaama, Camelus, Captain's Log, dart_ndk + yana, DVMDash, Formstr, futr, Groups, jesterui, Mostro, ngit, nostr-php, nostr-relay-tray, nostr-sdk-ios, nostr-spring-boot-starter, nostr.build, nostrability, Nostrmo, Nostrocket, nostroots, nostter, Notedeck, Osty, Safebox, Seer, Shopstr, Voyage, Whitenoise, and Zapstore.

You can read more about these projects in the respective announcements published in July, August, September, November, and December.

Grantees

We have added about a dozen projects to our list of grantees every month, picking up the pace quite a bit as compared to last year. Grantee growth is quite stable month over month, with 161 new grants given in 2024 (61 on the nostr side, and exactly 100 on the bitcoin side). In total, we have evaluated close to 1,000 applications resulting in 232 grants given.

As of this writing, we are sending about $1,000,000 worth of bitcoin to our grantees every month, something that—thanks to bitcoin—we can do at extremely low cost and with very little overhead.

As mentioned previously, we hope to support many of our grantees for the long term, as long as funding permits and progress remains aligned with our mission.

Outlook

As we head into the new year, we can’t help but marvel at how far we’ve come. Bitcoin is becoming more secure, more private, and easier to use by the minute. Nostr is shaping up to be the self-sovereign identity layer that the internet so desperately lacks, as well as a new paradigm on how to build stuff for the web. A paradigm that is resistant to censorship and downtime, with pseudonymous identity and lightning-fast payments built in. To say that we are bullish would be an understatement; we are exhilarated to see it all come together.

Nevertheless, much remains to be done. Bitcoin, Lightning, and nostr are far from perfect, and as these and other protocols evolve, we will do our best to support the projects and builders who are moving the needle. More than that: not only do we want to support innovation and improvements, but we first and foremost want to make sure that those who are maintaining, reviewing, and stress-testing critical infrastructure are taken care of. There are many unsung heroes that make all this stuff work, and we are here to support them.

Our generous donors make our support for free and open-source software possible. One of our goals for 2025 is to receive multiple recurring commitments to ensure that our long-term support programs are well-funded. After all, our mission is to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of funding for free and open-source projects and contributors. We hope that our track record will incentivize those who rely on bitcoin to give to OpenSats periodically, both to one of our funds as well as to our operations budget, which we use to independently fund our small team. We are one of the few charities that don’t take a cut from donations, so if you think we are doing good work and you want us to continue to exist, please continue to support us:

Our hope is to scale our grant-giving efforts considerably going forward, and we will share some thoughts on this matter at the beginning of the new year. In the best case, we want to see many more organizations like OpenSats, as we believe that specialization and a broader support network are paramount as the various ecosystems grow and specialize. We don’t have a crystal ball, but from our perspective, it isn’t hard to imagine that nostr and eCash are here to stay and are bound to grow, and it isn’t outlandish to think that open-source hardware will gain in importance as well. Bitcoin will continue to be of the utmost importance, and as it enters the political arena of the world stage we expect to see multiple non-profits created to support open-source developers across all kinds of jurisdictions. If you are thinking about creating such an organization don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Last but not least, we want to dedicate this final paragraph to all of you. Whether you are a donor, grantee, future applicant, or simply an inquisitive reader who is interested in bitcoin and freedom tech—the revolution that is currently happening is only happening because of you. We are immensely thankful for your time, care, and attention. You could be spending it on anything else, but you choose to spend it on bitcoin and freedom tech. Thank you. We are beyond grateful for the support we received, both monetarily as well as in the form of community and volunteer efforts, and it's exhilarating to see the technical progress across projects we support. You are what makes all of this work, and we couldn't be doing it without you.

Here's to freedom, and an even better 2025. Onwards!