Square Crypto: grants for Bitcoin-based projects

Square Crypto has announced grants for teams or people working on Bitcoin-based projects.

In fact, the company, owned by Square and led by Jack Dorsey, is not only supporting the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem by creating toolkits for developers, or contributing to Lightning Network, but also providing grants that allow developers to work on Bitcoin independently and autonomously. 

So far, grants have been provided to BTCPayServer and ZmnSCPxj, and today two more have been assigned to Jon Atack and Tankred Hase. 

The company intends to support other projects as well, in particular teams or individuals working on Bitcoin-related projects, regardless of where they work. 

Square Crypto says: 

“If you don’t have the financial means to build financial freedom for others, a Square Crypto Grant could be what you need.” 

The company has set some rules when applying for upcoming grants, such as the fact that proposals should aim to improve bitcoin’s scalability, UX, privacy, security or otherwise, they should get along well with the Bitcoin community, and projects should be free and open-source, with no business or profit purpose. 

Several examples are presented to give the idea: improvements to private key management, development of bitcoin wallet libraries like coin selection and compact block filters, privacy implementations such as SNICKER or Payjoin coinjoins, strengthening p2p networking in Core or light clients, layer 2 solutions that are separate from LN or complementary to it, improvements to mining robustness and decentralization, developing a wallet for the needs of a specific region of the world, fuzz testing Core to improve its security and robustness.

The company suggests sending detailed applications via email to [email protected], although it does not indicate how much funding has been allocated or how many projects will be selected. 

Nevertheless, this initiative of theirs at least seems to be in line with the decentralized and non-profit approach of the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.