The international non-profit organization will award each project USD 25,000 in Bitcoin. The Gemini Opportunity Fund supports the awarded funds.
In recent days, two projects to improve the use of Bitcoin received financial aid from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF). The projects that benefited are those of Ben Kaufman and the Global Mesh Labs team. The HRF Bitcoin Development Fund will award each of them the amount of USD 25,000 in Bitcoin.
Open-source software developer Ben Kaufman will use the sum to enhance his “Specter Desktop” desktop wallet. According to the HRF, “Ben’s work at Specter will make it even easier for anyone to be their own bank.”
Ben Kaufman explained that he has spent some time working on Specter Desktop. He said that “this is an interface to protect people’s wallets, without depending on third-party servers.”
Kaufman also described some of the main features that this desktop wallet offers. He mentioned that its own device (node) allows it not to depend on third parties. Besides, he stated that it is compatible with any hardware wallet or physical device for saving private cryptocurrency keys. This tool also allows configuring users’ wallets as single sig and multi sig. Besides, it allows selecting cryptocurrencies and improves the sending of funds through blockstream services.
Improving Bitcoin Core Payment Channels
The Human Rights Foundation will also award USD 25,000 to the Lot49 project from Global Mesh Labs. This company is currently developing a decentralized network of payment channels based on Bitcoin and Lightning Network.
The abovementioned project is based on technology for Android mobile devices with low bandwidth mobile networks. It will allow Bitcoin to “be more usable in environments of mobile devices with irregular Internet connectivity, unstable currencies, and poor infrastructure.” That is what developers Richard Myers, Fodé Diop, and Will Clark predict.
According to the details of the project, “existing payment channel protocols do not focus on efficiently routing data and payments at the same time.” For that reason, they believe that their app would solve this problem by preserving decentralization. Global Mesh Labs claim that their signature aggregation and channel update scheme are more efficient to settle transactions. They believe that their system opens a flexible design space to optimize the coverage and reliability of mobile mesh networks to preserve decentralization.
Other Projects that Have Received Financing
Last year, another project (From Venezuela) aimed at improving payment channels received financing from the Monero community fund. They are Locha Mesh, the creators of a device called “el Turpial”. Its purpose is to issue Bitcoin transactions and messages without the Internet.
Other developers have received help from the HRF thanks to the Gemini exchange. Since December of last year, this platform has had a donation fund to support the development of Bitcoin Core. In December 2020, the HFR also financed, along with Square Crypto, the Package Mempool Accept project. Its objective is to “optimize the Bitcoin fee system.”
By Alexander Salazar
