Fourth Wave of Bitcoin Grants

As Bitcoin is approaching its next halving event, developers all over the world are working tirelessly to bring about a better future promised by sound and permissionless money. We are trying our best to help bring said future about by providing no-strings-attached funding for the most impactful open-source projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and we are planning to do this for many more decades to come.

Our board has selected eight more projects for funding. In no particular order, here they are:

• Splicing in LDK
• Bitcoin Core Testing Suite
• BLAST
• Scaling Lightning
• Satsigner
• The Bitaxe
• The Bitcoin LARP Game
• Braidpool

All of the above grants are sourced from our General Fund, which is funded by generous donors like you. If you want to help us support free and open-source projects please consider donating to the fund:

This marks the fourth wave of grants given to bitcoin projects, following our announcements in July, August, and December. In case you’re interested in the types of projects and people we support, we encourage you to have a look at our long-term support grants as well as our year in review.

As always, let's take a closer look at the projects to understand what they are about and how they align with our mission.

Splicing in LDK

Splicing is a Lightning improvement that brings several practical advantages to users and node operators alike, such as more flexible channel management options with lower fees & no downtime. It also allows for better experiences when it comes to using wallets that combine on-chain and lightning payments. The goal of ldk-splicing is to add splicing support to LDK in an interoperable and pragmatic way.

Repository: ldksplicing/ldk-splicing
License: Apache 2.0 / MIT

Bitcoin Core Testing Suite

The Bitcoin Core Testing Suite aims to increase the coverage and robustness of Bitcoin Core’s testing suite. This will help increase the stability and reliability of the bitcoin-core software and help give developers confidence when working on improvements.

Repository: bitcoin/bitcoin (PRs)
License: MIT

BLAST

The “Big Lightning Automated Simulation Tool” (BLAST) is a modeling and simulation framework specifically designed for the Lightning Network. Acting as both a software library and a standalone tool, BLAST aims to facilitate the creation of accurate tests and simulations that replicate real-world Lightning Network behavior.

The primary objective of this project is to conduct research and development to devise an efficient representation of nodes and channels. This representation will enable the modeling of large networks while offering flexibility to customize necessary assumptions.

Repository: bjohnson5/blast
License: GPL 3.0

Scaling Lightning

Scaling Lightning is a framework for creating and interacting with test lightning networks. The project aims to provide a realistic lightning network environment for developers to build and develop their applications and services. Similar in concept to testnet faucets, scaling-lightning is a great tool for experimentation and learning.

A lot of the work is now being integrated into warnet, a monitoring tool that analyzes the emergent behavior of Bitcoin networks.

Repository: scaling-lightning/scaling-lightning / bitcoin-dev-project/warnet
License: MIT

Satsigner

Satsigner is a mobile wallet that aims to give the user full control and visibility over what is happening to their sats at the protocol level. Most bitcoin wallets in use today use traditional designs and patterns that hide the underlying mechanics of the bitcoin protocol. While this trade-off might be appropriate for new users, failing to equip users with more meaningful and in-depth interfaces can hinder the acquisition of a deeper understanding of bitcoin. By focusing on the user experience problems from a bitcoiner’s perspective, the project hopes to develop native solutions for UTXO, fee, multisig, and key management.

Repository: satsigner/satsigner
License: MIT

The Bitaxe

The Bitaxe is the first ASIC bitcoin miner in nearly a decade with fully open-source hardware and firmware. The primary goal is to be a reference design that can be taken as is, scaled up, and/or adapted to solve specific bitcoin mining use cases. The design takes into consideration cost and ease of access to core components while remaining a competitive miner.

Documentation on how to manufacture the device, program the firmware, and contribute is central to the project.

Repository: skot/bitaxe
License: GPL 3.0

The Bitcoin LARP Game

The world-famous Bitcoin LARP is a game designed to understand the inner workings of Bitcoin in a fun and interactive way. The goal of this project is to have open-source kits available to anyone that are easy to replicate, use, and set up.

Beyond just software and optimizing for the ability to make kits easy to build & distribute, all instructions and build kit information will be made available under permissive open-source licenses too.

Repository: base58btc/LARP
License: GPL 3.0

Braidpool

Braidpool is a decentralized bitcoin mining pool. Braidpool aims to ship an implementation working on signet with hashrate donated by interested miners. The project will also publish their specifications and engage the mining community for wider adoption of Braidpool.

The Braidpool proposal builds upon Schnorr signatures and Taproot, as well as novel peer-to-peer research. Braidpool enables all miners to do their own block construction and miner payouts can not be blocked by a central authority like a pool operator.

Repository: pool2win/braidpool
License: MIT

We are evaluating applications based on carefully defined criteria and we do our best to select only the most impactful and promising proposals.

Thank you for your continual and generous support. As we don't take a cut from donations to open-source projects, we couldn't be doing what we are doing without your help. If you want to help us cover our operational expenses, please consider donating to our operations budget.