Our second quarter of the foundation was quite eventful. We’d like to start by saying thank you to everyone who is helping out making the Bitcoin Design Community & Foundation work. Setting up and running a foundation is a lot of work and we could not do it without the generous support of so many of you.

We had a first real-world meeting of foundation admins and grantees at BTC Prague. More on that in the Bitcoin Design newsletter. Daniel and Christoph also spoke about Bitcoin Design and the foundation on Citadel Dispatch.

We gave out five new grants this quarter:

Several short-term grants expire in the next months, and we will discuss renewals and extensions with grantees accordingly.

On the fundraising side, we now accept bitcoin donations, and received donations from Spiral, Chaincode Labs, and several individual contributors. Our current balance in the collective is €227,505.13 in the collective, with most of that already committed to outgoing grants.

The foundation aims to be as transparent as possible. As an example, the budget and spending is visible to anyone on our Open Collective page. In this spirit we want to highlight that two of the foundation admins are also grant recipients. At these early stages of the foundation when fundraising is a top priority, this is a practical solution that means the admins can focus solely on fundraising for the foundation, as opposed to also looking for personal grants from elsewhere. Over time we will look to establish an operational budget (similar to OpenSats) to separate costs of running the foundation from the grant budget.

We are making progress establishing a board, expecting to announce it in Q3. Since the foundation is hosted by Open Collective and not an independent legal entity, the board will, at least initially, have more of an advisory role.

Next to establishing the board, our areas of focus for the next quarter are:

We are excited about the progress this quarter and look forward to continue growing the group of grantees. Do not hesitate to reach out to us with any feedback and questions you may have.

– Mo, Daniel, And Christoph