The Bitcoin Design Foundation is a nonprofit that supports individuals and projects that work on improving the bitcoin user experience. It is being set up by core contributors from the Bitcoin Design Community, and will work to sustain and expand the impact of this community.
Over the last years, the model of individual designers and researchers supported by grants producing open design for the greater good of the ecosystem has been proven. The Bitcoin Design Community, established in 2020, has produced the Bitcoin Design Guide, the Bitcoin UI Kit, reference designs and adoption-pushing efforts like the unified QR code and taproot campaigns. The large community has held hundreds of calls, organized Designathons and worked directly with many open source projects to improve their design. A small number of grants initiated this huge body of collective work, positively impacting the whole bitcoin ecosystem.
To ensure that this effort can continue and grow further, the Bitcoin Design Foundation will work to increase the resilience of bitcoin design funding, by decentralizing and expanding the pool of sponsors and the total amount available for grants.
The Bitcoin Design Foundation has been set up by Christoph Ono, Mogashni Naidoo and Daniel Nordh. All three are core contributors, maintainers and organizers of the Bitcoin Design Community’s projects and activities. In addition to these three admins, the foundation will have an advisory board providing oversight and guidance.
By becoming a credible and easy to sponsor nonprofit that is able to pool donations from many small and large sponsors. The goal is to increase the amount of total funding available for bitcoin design.
Primarily grants to individuals working on open source bitcoin design efforts. Through its close involvement in the community, it will be able to source highly motivated and vetted individuals to support with grants that enable them to work on open source bitcoin design, user research and associated areas.
It will also support Bitcoin Design Community projects with ongoing or one-off costs such as domain fees, events and educational material.
We will continuously promote that working on open-source bitcoin design is a viable opportunity, through grants from the foundation and other means. It’s always best when the marketing is just a natural byproduct of community and grant initiatives. Some of the places where the foundation and grant opportunities will be promoted include:
While we also expect some net-new inbound interest once the foundation goes public, Discord and the various community calls, through which we are able to identify people that are already motivated, engaged and actively contributing, is by far the best talent source at the moment. Continuing to grow the community, its projects, initiatives and outreach will therefore be the best path for both marketing and the talent pipeline.
The foundation will consider grants for full time and part time work for up to 12 months at a time. New grantees or community members can expect to start with a shorter duration grant. Full time grant amounts will be set at market competitive reference rates and prorated for shorter duration grants. Grants will be paid on a monthly basis for long-term grants and for shorter grants we will open a discussion with the grantee.
Potential grantees will need to prepare an application outlining what they plan to work on and achieve while on the grant. Ideally this is informed by ongoing discussion or work in the community. The admins will review applications monthly, make recommendations and get input from the board before grants are approved.
The foundation is registered with Open Collective Europe, a nonprofit platform commonly used by other nonprofits and communities. This provides a legal and fundraising platform with full financial transparency and low overhead. It is a proven host for similar causes, and provides convenient features for both large and small donors from all over the world, including both one time and recurring donations complete with invoices, reporting and tax free status where applicable. Less time spent on admin and accounting means more spent on furthering bitcoin design.
Donations are handled through the Open Collective platform. Find all the donation information here. If you'd like to donate bitcoin, we have a dedicated fundraiser page for that.
For direct questions, email us at donate@bitcoindesignfoundation.org.
Thank you for your interest in supporting bitcoin design. We hope to see you around and you can always contact us via our Open Collective page.