Sats Well Spent — 2026-Q1: Cypherpunks Write Code

Dear Reader,

I could write endless pages on the projects that OpenSats has funded, and maybe one day I will. But today, let me do the opposite instead: talk about what OpenSats doesn't fund, and why.

We don't fund anything that is closed source. FOSS is non-negotiable. "Source viewable" doesn't cut it either. All projects must have a proper license that makes the source code free as in freedom.

We don't fund anything that has a shitcoin attached to it. We are bitcoin only, and always will be. Money printing takes from the many and gives to the few, which is clearly and obviously immoral. It's a travesty that money printing is so widespread and normalized as it is today. And while fiat money is the worst offender, shitcoins are a close second. We exist to solve the problem of sustainable funding, and projects that print their own money don't have a funding problem, obviously. (Money printing isn't sustainable long-term either, but that's a story for another day.)

While we do fund projects that could evolve into for-profit endeavors, we try to focus on funding software and infrastructure that can't be monetized easily. We are not a VC, or an incubator, or an entity that invests in projects, products, or startups. Investments and profits are important, but OpenSats is focusing on something else: providing a sustainable and consistent ecosystem to fund FOSS contributors. That was our mission statement from Day 1, and it will continue to be going forward.

In the next couple of years we hope to move closer to our goal of long-term sustainability. The plan is simple: grow the overall ecosystem, encourage individuals and companies to give to open-source projects (either via OpenSats or directly), help said projects to become self-sustaining, and encourage other orgs to do the same. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" and all that.

My hope is that OpenSats will eventually become obsolete. Until it is, we are dependent on donors who believe, like we do, that free and open-source software is paramount to a free and prosperous society.

No prosperity without bitcoin.
No freedom without FOSS.

— Gigi

Running the Numbers

Whether you're using bitcoin, nostr, or any other cryptographic system, you're relying on astronomically large numbers and their mathematical relationships. Our numbers are orders of magnitude smaller, but no less consequential (in our humble opinion, at least).

400 grants, and counting. This quarter, we crossed 400 grants awarded since our inception.
3,000+ application evaluations. Every grant application is reviewed independently by multiple board members and technical committees.
10,904 pull requests. Our grantees cited that many in their 2025 progress reports. The fuller picture is in our 2025 Year in Review, out late January.
1,224 issues closed, leading to 477 releases. That's in 2026-Q1 alone. Explore them all at heartbeat.opensats.org.

We expect these numbers to increase quite drastically going forward. Creating software is now easier than ever, as is writing grant applications. And while still challenging at scale, sending sats gets easier by the day too.

Sats Sent: ~$1,000,000 every month

In total, OpenSats has allocated $... USD to free and open-source projects and sent ~... sats to ... grantees in 40+ countries.

Bitcoin & open-source software is what allows us to efficiently operate on such a scale. We send ~$1,000,000 worth of sats to our grantees every month. We do that with an incredibly small team, at almost zero cost. By leveraging bitcoin for payouts, we pay less than 0.0005% (about $5) in transaction fees each month to send money to all our grantees, globally and almost instantly. A fraction of the costs other NGOs face and a testament to operating on the Bitcoin standard.

Sats Received

In Q1 2026, 181 donations totaled $281,747.52. 113 USD donations brought in $88,284.45, and 68 bitcoin-based donations brought in $193,463.07. Two of the larger donations this quarter were recurring, which is what we love to see:

A $116,000 operating grant from the Human Rights Foundation. HRF's Q4 2025 Bitcoin Development Fund round included us in the January announcement. HRF funding is going to our Operations Budget, which allows us to operate without taking a cut from donations to our grant funds.
A $77,666 donation from Bitwise. Bitwise's BITB ETF began sending a share of its gross profits to our General Fund this quarter. It's part of the 10% pledge Bitwise made at launch; Brink and HRF's Bitcoin Development Fund are the other recipients.

We deeply appreciate all the support we've received so far. As mentioned above and in our 2025 Year in Review, we are giving out grants on the order of $1M per month, meaning we are a long stretch away from our recurring funding goal. So today we're asking you to help us out. If you get value from the software we fund, please consider giving a donation to support it!

Software Shipped

Our grantees are involved in hundreds of projects and new software is shipped constantly. Some highlights of this past quarter include:

Payjoin release candidate: payjoin-1.0.0-rc.2 shipped in late February.
Stratum V2: the reference implementation shipped v1.8.0 in March.
Smite by Matt Morehouse: a snapshot fuzzer for Lightning, supporting LND, LDK, CLN, and Eclair. Already turned up DoS bugs in Eclair and LND.
Private broadcast merged into Bitcoin Core in late January, led by our long-term support (LTS) grantee Vasil Dimov. Nodes can now broadcast transactions over Tor or I2P while still peering on clearnet for blocks.
Numo ships tap-to-pay: turns any NFC-capable Android phone into a merchant terminal accepting bitcoin over Cashu and Lightning.

But software isn't everything. Our grantees also work on protocol specifications, publish academic research, and work on formal proof systems to make sure that things are as reliable and secure as they can be.

After years of work by LTS grantee Dusty Daemon and colleagues, splicing is now a BOLT. Splicing makes the Lightning Network faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
René Pickhardt published A Mathematical Theory of Payment Channel Networks. The paper formalizes how routing, liquidity, feasibility, and channel depletion behave on the Lightning Network.
Formal proofs for secp256k1. We funded remix7531 in February to write formal proofs for the cryptographic routines used in bitcoin signature verification. He talks about it on the Bitcoin Optech podcast.

We could list endless bullet points when it comes to software releases for the projects we fund, but frankly, it would be too much. Instead of boring you with changelogs and releases, we've built OpenSats heartbeat, a live feed of every release, commit, and pull request across the projects we fund.

View Heartbeat

If you select our nostr fund, you'll see that this quarter brought new releases for Amber, Amethyst, Applesauce, Citrine, Igloo, LNbits, Mostro, NDK, ngit, Notedeck, ZapStore, and more.

Cypherpunks Write Code

"Cypherpunks write code" is what Eric Hughes wrote in March of 1993. He went on to specify that the "code is free for all to use" so that others "may practice and play with it." What he is describing, of course, is what we now know as free and open-source software, or FOSS for short. Bitcoin was built as open-source software because, in the words of its creator, "being open source means anyone can independently review the code. If it was closed source, nobody could verify the security." Thus, "[it is] essential for a program of this nature to be open source."

OpenSats was created to provide sustainable funding for those who work on open-source software, especially those who work on projects that help Bitcoin flourish. The sad reality is that most software today, financial or otherwise, is closed-source and exploitative. It doesn't have to be. But building the tools that ensure self-sovereignty, financial freedom, and free speech in the hyperdigitized world we find ourselves in requires funding, and the reality is that less than 1% of users who benefit from the FOSS ecosystem give back to it, financially or otherwise.

Our hope is that this will change as the need for open and interoperable systems becomes more obvious. This newsletter is part of our efforts to make the case for these open systems; to tell the stories of the people who are working on freedom tech, and why they choose to go through the pains of working in public.

Hughes wrote his Manifesto in 1993. Thirty years later, and his prediction that "cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe" turned out to be on point. The question now is, to paraphrase Hal Finney, will this cryptography be used to control people, or will it be used to liberate and protect them?

We are doing what we can to make sure that it is the latter, but we can't do it without your help.

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