NEW YORK (December 1, 2020) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has announced that its next Bitcoin Development Fund gift will be a $50,000 grant to Bitcoin core developer Gloria Zhao, who is graduating this month from UC Berkeley with a degree in computer science.
Gloria Zhao’s grant will help fund her upcoming year-long fellowship at Brink, a new Bitcoin development initiative founded by John Newbery and Mike Schmidt, where she will focus on a project called Package Mempool Accept. With support from HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund and Square Crypto, Gloria will work over the coming year at Brink with world-class mentors on Package Mempool Accept to increase Bitcoin’s processing capability, improve Lightning Network usability, and lay the foundation for “package relay.”
Package relay is an upgrade that would enable users to send and receive transactions over the Bitcoin network in packages. Each package could be accepted or rejected based on the total amount of fees it contains. Today, each individual transaction is accepted or rejected based on its own fee. But the network will not accept transactions with a fee smaller than a minimum threshold. This limitation prevents transactions with tiny fees from processing and poses security and growth challenges to second-layer Bitcoin technologies like the Lightning Network. Gloria’s work aims at helping Bitcoin users eventually make more private transactions at scale.
In a second update, HRF is delighted to announce that Gemini is making a $50,000 gift to the Bitcoin Development Fund. Gemini was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and is one of the world’s top cryptocurrency companies. HRF will announce its next round of Bitcoin Development Fund gifts with support from Gemini in Q1 2021.
Launched in 2020 to support open source software, HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund focuses on improving the privacy, usability, and resilience of the Bitcoin Network. Gloria joins previous grant recipients including Chris Belcher for Coinswap, Openoms for JoinInbox, Evan Kaloudis for Zeus, and Fontaine for Fully Noded.
HRF continues to raise support for the Bitcoin Development Fund, with the goal of announcing new gifts several times per year. HRF is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law.
Gifts can be made at HRF.org/DevFund, while proposals for support can be submitted to [email protected]. Follow @HRF on Twitter for more updates on this project and all of our other programs designed to promote freedom and human rights around the world.