Doubling Down on Nostr

While we have made almost 30 announcements related to The Nostr Fund since the first wave of grants in July 2023, we haven't announced all the grants that we have given yet. This blog post aims to rectify this situation.

It is obvious that nostr is very much a necessity in today's day and age. As censorship and deplatforming are on the rise across the world, the free flow of information—a necessity for a prosperous society—is at risk. Further, it should be obvious that yet another platform will not fix this problem, no matter how seemingly benevolent the king of said platform claims to be. What is required is a neutral protocol; a protocol that is truly open in terms of usage and development alike; a protocol that does not discriminate, just like bitcoin does not discriminate.

While nostr and bitcoin are a perfect match—the former might serve as a potential coordination layer for collaborative transactions for the latter, provide the basis for a seamless social payment experience in wallets, or act as a permissionless app store to install bitcoin software on desktop and mobile operating systems—nostr is its own ecosystem entirely. It is complementary to bitcoin, not reliant upon it. In addition to zaps and other stuff that bitcoiners are enthusiastic about, nostr is an identity-native communication layer that has the power to transform the Web as we know it. For all these reasons, but also because nostr is just fucking awesome, we're doubling down on it.

We have recently given additional grants to various projects, extended existing nostr grants, and "upgraded" some of our grantees from "regular" grants to long-term support grants.

We gave additional grants to:

And as announced previously and individually, the following grantees receive long-term support from us for their outstanding and ongoing contributions to the nostr ecosystem: Pablo, hzrd149, Hodlbod, Yuki, fiatjaf, jb55, Kieran, Daniele, Alex Gleason, Mike Dilger, Vitor Pamplona, and Greenart7c3.

It goes without saying, but this is just the beginning. The Nostr Fund is less than two years old, and we hope that we can help provide sustainable funding for freedom tech for many years to come. And in the long run, we hope that we can find a way for projects to be self-sustaining without capturing themselves or their users.

All of the above is only possible because of you, our donors. If you want to help us provide funding to the nostr ecosystem, please consider making a donation to The Nostr Fund:

If you are an open-source developer working on nostr (and other stuff), please don't hesitate to apply for a grant: https://opensats.org/apply/grant