The (HRF) just announced grants totaling over 500 million satoshis to 16 freedom tech projects worldwide through its Bitcoin Development Fund, and some of these are exactly what practical Bitcoin adoption should look like.
BitSpenda: A mobile money-to-bitcoin bridge across Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, and Ghana. Non-custodial, no account required. Send bitcoin from a Lightning wallet, recipient gets local currency in their mobile money account.
Project Island Resilience: Adding offline payments to Flash, a Jamaican Bitcoin wallet that raised and distributed over $10,000 in bitcoin within 72 hours after Hurricane Melissa. Now building Bluetooth, NFC, and ecash support so Bitcoin works during internet shutdowns and protests.
Bitzed: Connecting mobile money directly to Bitcoin in Zambia. Buy bitcoin with mobile money, receive it in your own Lightning wallet. No bank, no exchange, no identity records.
Libbitcoinkernel: Extracting Bitcoin's core security rules into reusable modules so developers can build secure wallets without duplicating critical code from scratch.
WalletScrutiny: Auditing Bitcoin wallets to verify the software you're running actually matches the open-source code it claims to be. Especially relevant after the ColdCard vulnerability.
Vector: A Nostr-based encrypted messenger with voice and video calls. No accounts, no metadata trails. Built for journalists, activists, and whistleblowers under authoritarian regimes.
Flotilla Chat: Discord built on Nostr. Your identity is portable and the hosting provider can't delete your community. Built by the team behind the Nostr client Coracle.
0xchat: Nostr messaging with encrypted chat, file transfer, voice and video calls, Tor integration to mask your location, and a built-in Cashu wallet for private Bitcoin payments.
256 Foundation: Open-sourcing every component of a Bitcoin miner to break the hardware manufacturing oligopoly and make mining more accessible and decentralized.
OpenAlert: Decentralized emergency alerts over Nostr that don't rely on Apple or Google push notifications. End-to-end encrypted with self-destructing messages.
Since 2020, HRF's Bitcoin Development Fund has granted $12.2 million in BTC to 383 projects across 70 countries. Bitcoin is a human rights tool, not just a financial asset.

Human Rights Foundation
HRF Grants 500M+ Satoshis to 16 Freedom Tech Projects Worldwide
NEW YORK (August 25, 2026) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is pleased to announce grants totaling more than 500 million satoshis from its Bit...
