Jack Dorsey creator, co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter and co-founder & CEO of Square arrives on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is proving just how serious he is about bitcoin and the future of social networks with a $10 million donation to the non-profit OpenSats, which says it 100% of the funds to develop both. In other words, they say they’re not taking a cut for themselves.
Dorsey shared the donation—$5 million of which is set aside to fund development of a social protocol called Nostr—on Nostr itself earlier today. After being quietly in development by a pseudonymous creator known only as @Fiatjaf, the network, or protocol as it is more properly called, exploded to 16 million users, 500,000 of which are daily when they created a way for software developers to integrate bitcoin payments into their applications.
Prior to leaving Twitter in TK, Dorsey had conceived and invested $13 million into a similar open-source social protocol that let users move their profiles between competitors, now being developed by a team called Bluesky. Though he’d previously given @FiatJaf 14 bitcoin worth a little over $200,000 at the time it was donated, this latest infusion seems designed to level the playing field and remove any sense that he’s picking favorites in his mission to out-compete Twitter.
“$10m to OpenSats to fund bitcoin and nostr development,” Dorsey shared on Nostr. “$5m of that dedicated to nostr!”
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based OpenSats received its 501 © (3) non-profit status in 2021, according to non-profit data site Charity Navigator. Most of the data about non-profits that Charity Navigator offers, such as how much of historical donations have been used for the non-profit’s actual mission compared to the cost of running the organization, are unavailable, as the OpenSats filed reduced paperwork required for organizations with less than $200,000 revenue annually.
As part of Dorsey’s donation, OpenSats says @Fiatjaf and other Nostr user named using the pseudonym NVK will join a committee to help evaluate projects. NVK and a user identified as Gigi are joining the board.
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The OpenSat’s website describes the organization’s mission to “support and maintain a sustainable ecosystem of funding for free and open source projects and contributors, especially Bitcoin
BTC
The organization has previously funded 21 teams, including the Bitcoin Policy Institute, which just hosted an invitation-only event in DC that touted attendees from Capitol Hill, and BTCPay server, a payment processor hosted by the people who use it and the Tor Project that develops the Tor browser used by the governments and criminals alike to project their identities. Funds include an operations budget to help run the non-profit and a legal defense fund to help open-source developers in court. It’s unclear if this is the same legal defense fund Dorsey said he would create to help pay legal expenses of bitcoin developers being sued for their work.
