{"id":129612,"date":"2025-05-20T11:15:34","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T11:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=129612"},"modified":"2025-05-20T11:15:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T11:15:34","slug":"bitcoin-privacy-tool-payjoin-receives-100k-grant-from-maelstrom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=129612","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin privacy tool Payjoin receives $100K grant from Maelstrom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsBitcoin developer Ben Allen has received a $100,000 grant from investment firm Maelstrom to support the development of Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool aimed at improving Bitcoin\u2019s scalability and privacy.
\nAccording to a May 20 announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Maelstrom will finance Allen\u2019s work on his Payjoin devkit alongside Dan Gould. The system allows Bitcoin (BTC) senders and receivers to use batched transactions, with positive implications for scalability and privacy.
\nPayjoin Developer Kit\u2019s website. Source: Payjoin Dev KitPayjoin was first proposed by Nicolas Dorier in 2019 in Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) 78. The core principle behind the system is that both senders and receivers may contribute inputs to a transaction.
\n\u201cNamely that privacy is enhanced and improved consolidation of transaction outputs is achieved, benefiting scalability,\u201c the Maelstrom announcement states.
\nA Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that grantees are paid monthly for a total of $100,000 per year in Bitcoin and Allen\u2019s grant will last one year. There are no concrete milestones and the grant is managed on a hands-off approach:
\n\u201cWe believe grantees may work better with freedom to work on what they wish, rather than being tightly controlled by those who provide the funding.\u201c
\nRelated: Bitcoin privacy will survive despite CoinJoin closure \u2014 zkSNACKs CEO
\nPayjoin: Soon in wallets near you?
\nAllen will be working on improving Payjoin implementations, with the clear objective of making it possible for the feature to be added to more wallets. He explained that the funding will enable him to work on the project full time.
\nThe announcement points out that the system presents challenges, with the receiver needing to be online and the payment communication flow being more complex than normal non-interactive Bitcoin transactions. Maelstrom\u2019s chief investment officer and BitMEX crypto exchange co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes said that \u201cimproving financial privacy in Bitcoin is extremely important.\u201d He added:
\n\u201cThe 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.\u201c
\nA Maelstrom representative explained to Cointelegraph that the firm \u201cis keen to support more grantees in the privacy area.\u201d The company is actively seeking candidates with strong track records in Bitcoin privacy projects.
\nRelated: What are privacy coins and how do they differ from Bitcoin?
\nEnjoy the benefits whether you use it or not
\nHayes noted that \u201cPayjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don\u2019t use it.\u201d Allen said he believes privacy is important for Bitcoin users to enjoy a better experience and control their financial data when using it daily.
\nAllen told Cointelegraph he is \u201cbuilding out benchmarks to help downstream developers implement Payjoin in individual wallet software as well as expanding test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code.\u201d He explained that encouraging its adoption \u201cis the biggest step we can take for simplifying the experience and encouraging Payjoin adoption by moving the complexities mostly away from the user.\u201d
\nThe Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that \u201ca key metric for Payjoin success would be adoption by popular open source Bitcoin wallets.\u201d \u201cIn particular if the BitcoinCore wallet ever adopts it, that would be a huge signal of success,\u201d they added.
\nMagazine: Big Questions: What did Satoshi Nakamoto think about ZK-proofs?Read More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsBitcoin developer Ben Allen has received a $100,000 grant from investment firm Maelstrom to support the development of Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool aimed at improving Bitcoin\u2019s scalability and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129612"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}