Today, we are happy to announce the Bitcoin Design Foundation. It is a non-profit that supports the mission of the Bitcoin Design Community to “Design bitcoin for everyone”, by organizing funding for open design and research in the bitcoin ecosystem.

Founding members are Christoph, Mo and Daniel, three experienced core contributors, maintainers and organizers of the Bitcoin Design Community’s projects and activities.

If you’re not familiar with the Bitcoin Design Community yet, it was founded in 2020 and has since been an open forum for designers and builders, and produced resources for the greater ecosystem such as:

The community has also had thousands of conversations in Discord, held hundreds of calls, and worked directly with many open source projects to improve their design and design processes.

All of this has been possible due to Spiral, who established the community and has been its biggest supporter, not just financially, but in countless other ways as well. Spiral will continue to be this backbone (thank you!), and the foundation is an effort to expand the scope.

The foundation is in the service of the community, will support the long-term sustainability of its efforts, and help expand the impact of good design on bitcoin. While most other funding initiatives are focused on developers, we will bring the lens of design to these larger discussion around supporting a healthy open-source bitcoin ecosystem.

That means we will be actively involved in regular fundraising efforts. If we do well (fingers crossed), there will be funds available for grants to support individuals and projects. At the time of writing this post, the balance is still €0. But, we’re in conversation with several potential donors, so hopefully this will change very soon.

The more of us chip in, the bigger our impact. We’d love your support in making the foundation, and by extension the community and bitcoin, a success.

If you are interested in receiving funding, reach out. You can get the basic information you need in our grants page. We know that open-source funding can be a mystery to designers, and we’re happy to shed light on things.

If you’d like to donate, we’d like to first thank you in advance. Small and large donations can be made directly on the foundation page. For bitcoin donations, or if you’d like to have a conversation first, see our page for donors. We are also incredibly thankful for new connections, shares on social media, and other support in getting the word out and the flywheel spinning.

It’s been a long road to make this foundation a reality, from first conversations over two years ago. Now we are ready to roll. Major thanks to everyone who has supported the foundation initiative so far, and thanks in advance for your future support.

For future updates, subscribe to the foundation newsletter, the Bitcoin Design newsletter, and join the #foundation channel in the Bitcoin Design Discord.

To open-source bitcoin design and user research.

Mogashni, Daniel, Christoph