- Ben Allen receives a $100,000 grant from Maelstrom to advance Payjoin in Bitcoin development.
- The funding supports Allen’s work on the Payjoin devkit alongside Dan Gould to boost privacy and scalability.
- Payjoin lets both senders and receivers add inputs in a Bitcoin transaction, improving privacy and consolidating outputs.
- The grant pays out monthly in Bitcoin over one year, without strict milestones or oversight from Maelstrom.
- Adoption by major open-source Bitcoin wallets is considered a key measure of Payjoin’s success.
Ben Allen, a Bitcoin developer, has received a $100,000 grant from investment company Maelstrom to support his work on Payjoin, a tool aimed at enhancing privacy and scalability for Bitcoin transactions. The announcement, made on May 20, highlights that Allen, along with developer Dan Gould, will use the funding to further develop the Payjoin devkit.
Payjoin is designed to let both the sender and the receiver contribute inputs to a single Bitcoin transaction. According to Maelstrom, this approach increases privacy and consolidates transaction outputs, which in turn supports Bitcoin’s scalability. The grant is paid monthly in Bitcoin over a one-year period and allows Allen to focus on the project full time. “We believe grantees may work better with freedom to work on what they wish, rather than being tightly controlled by those who provide the funding,” a Maelstrom representative said.
Payjoin was first proposed by Nicolas Dorier in BIP 78 in 2019. A core benefit of Payjoin, as noted by Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom’s chief investment officer and co-founder of Bitmex, is the disruption it causes for transaction analysis. “The great thing about Payjoin is that if only a small amount of adoption is achieved, it breaks a key assumption used by financial surveillance companies. The assumption they have is that if a Bitcoin transaction has multiple inputs, all the inputs must all belong to the same entity,” Hayes said.
Allen aims to make Payjoin available in more Bitcoin wallets. He explained that he is working on benchmarks to help developers add Payjoin to their own wallet software and is expanding testing to ensure quality and consistency. “Encouraging its adoption is the biggest step we can take for simplifying the experience and encouraging Payjoin adoption by moving the complexities mostly away from the user,” Allen told Cointelegraph.
A representative from Maelstrom mentioned that broad adoption by popular open-source wallets, and especially if the BitcoinCore wallet adds support, would be milestones for Payjoin’s success. Hayes also noted that “Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don’t use it.”
Maelstrom is open to supporting additional privacy-focused projects and is seeking more candidates experienced in Bitcoin privacy. More details about Payjoin can be found on the Payjoin Developer Kit website.
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