Human Rights Foundation to award 20 BTC for Bitcoin protocol improvements

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) will award 20 BTC (around $600,000 at the time of writing) to developers for improvements to the Bitcoin protocol.

The bounty program focuses on ten open-source improvements to the first cryptocurrency, six of which are aimed at mobile wallets.

One of the tasks will be to audit open-source design components for Bitcoin projects, which currently rely largely on proprietary Figma software. The aim is to provide developers with free access to the Bitcoin user interface guidelines.

Another direction will be the development of the decentralised social network protocol Nostr, which enables end-to-end messaging without servers via relays.

For each of the ten improvements, developers will receive 2 BTC (roughly $60,000) from the Bitcoin Development Fund, HRF’s subsidiary.

According to HRF’s Director of Strategy, Alex Gladstein, the bounty program should accelerate the development of additional protocol features and, as a result, expand financial freedom for dissidents and human rights defenders around the world.

“HRF views Bitcoin as one component of the struggle for human rights. Human rights defenders are constantly attacked through their bank accounts. Bitcoin enables them to continue working,” said Gladstein.

The bounty program will run through the end of 2024.

In mid-2021, the Human Rights Foundation and derivatives exchange BitMEX allocated $150 000 to Bitcoin developer Kelvin Kim for contributions to the alpha version of the Utreexo protocol, which reduced the size of the UTXO without compromising network security.