Square Crypto Awards Grants to Bitcoin Devs, Jon Atack and Tankred Hase

Square Crypto, the bitcoin-focused startup founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has once again stepped up on its promise to support the development of Bitcoin. 

Aside from building developer toolkits, contributing to the Lightning Network and Bitcoin Core, Square Crypto also supplies grants that free up developers to work on improving Bitcoin with the earlier beneficiaries, including payment provider, BTCPayServer, and ZmnSCPxj.

Today, Square Crypto announced that it had awarded two more grants to Bitcoin developers Jon Atack and Tankred Hase.

Jon Atack is a Bitcoin Core developer ranked among the top 10 contributors in commits and reviews since beginning to contribute in March 2019 and is working on a wide range of Bitcoin improvements, including increasing the robustness of Bitcoin Core via code review, testing, bug discovery and fixes.

Tankred Hase, on the other hand, is a UX-focused bitcoin-dev whose plans include simplifying self-custody of smaller amounts of bitcoin, creating a public key server that makes it possible to text satoshis (the smallest unit of bitcoins).

Hase is also reportedly developing a React Native module to make it easy for JavaScript applications to use the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), which Square Crypto released earlier this year.

Requirements for Square Crypto Grant

Beyond announcing the new grants, Square Crypto also clearly stated some rules to guide future grant applicants, including devs who focus on improving bitcoin through UX, scaling, privacy, security, or something else that Square hasn’t thought before.

Being in good standing with the Bitcoin community and piloting projects that are free and open-source without a business or profit motive, are other requirements specified by Square.

Additionally, projects would likely get approved if they’re working on:

• improving Bitcoin private key management,
• developing bitcoin wallet libraries like coin selection and compact block filters,
• piloting privacy implementations like the SNICKER or Pay join conjoins
• Developing a wallet for the needs of a specific region of the world.
• Strengthening p2p networking in Core or light clients.

In another coverage of Square Crypto’s effort to promote Bitcoin adoption, Coinfomania reported that BTCPayServer received a $100,000 grant from the Jack Dorsey-led company.