Maelstrom has awarded a $100,000 grant to Payjoin, a Bitcoin privacy tool, to support its development and advance privacy-focused crypto transactions.
Bitcoin developer Ben Allen has received a $100,000 grant from Maelstrom to enhance Payjoin, a transaction method that prioritizes privacy and can potentially increase Bitcoin’s scalability.
The investment firm Maelstrom has awarded Bitcoin inventor Ben Allen a $100,000 grant to help him develop Payjoin, a privacy-focused solution that will increase the scalability and anonymity of Bitcoin.
A May 20 notification states that Maelstrom will fund Allen and Dan Gould to work on their Payjoin devkit. With benefits for scalability and anonymity, the technology enables Bitcoin’s (BTC) $104,861 sender and recipient to use batch transactions.
In 2019, Nicolas Dorier made the initial proposal for Payjoin in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 78. The system’s fundamental tenet is that inputs to a transaction can come from both senders and recipients.
According to the Maelstrom statement, “specifically that privacy is enhanced and improved consolidation of transaction outputs is achieved, benefiting scalability.”
Allen’s grant will run for a year, according to a Maelstrom spokesperson. Grantees receive monthly payments totaling $100,000 in Bitcoin annually. The funding is administered in a detached manner and without specific milestones:
“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.“
Payjoin: soon in wallets close to you?
With the apparent goal of extending the capability to more wallets, Allen will be working to enhance Payjoin implementations. He clarified that the funds will allow him to devote all his attention to the project.
The release notes that the method has drawbacks, including requiring the recipient to be online and a more complicated payment communication route than typical non-interactive Bitcoin transactions. Arthur Hayes, a former CEO and co-founder of the BitMEX cryptocurrency exchange and chief investment officer at Maelstrom, stated that “improving financial privacy in Bitcoin is important.” He went on to say:
“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“.
Maelstrom official says that the company “is keen to support more grantees in the privacy area.” The organization actively seeks candidates with a proven track record in Bitcoin privacy initiatives.
Take advantage of the benefits, whether you utilize it or not.
“Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don’t use it,” according to Hayes. According to Allen, privacy is crucial for Bitcoin users to have a better experience and control over their financial information when using it daily.
Allen said that he is “expanding test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code and building benchmarks to help downstream developers implement Payjoin in individual wallet software.” “The biggest step we can take to simplify the experience and encourage Payjoin adoption by moving the complexities mostly away from the user,” he stated, was to encourage its acceptance.
“A key metric for Payjoin’s success would be adoption by popular open-source Bitcoin wallets,” the Maelstrom spokesman said. “That would be a huge signal of success, especially if the Bitcoin Core wallet ever adopts it,” he added.
