Ben Allen Wins Maelstrom Bitcoin Developer Grant to Enhance Payjoin Dev Kit

Ben Allen has been named the third recipient of the Maelstrom Bitcoin Developer Grant, the family office of Arthur Hayes announced in a recent press release

Ben Allen, a Bitcoin developer, has been selected as the third recipient of the Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant, as announced by the family office of Arthur Hayes.

Over the next year, Allen will focus on advancing the Payjoin Dev Kit project, a privacy-focused initiative designed to enhance user anonymity and network scalability.

Payjoin, originally proposed by Nicolas Dorier in BIP 78, enables both the sender and receiver to contribute inputs to a single Bitcoin transaction. This disrupts a common assumption used by financial surveillance firms, namely the idea that multiple transaction inputs must come from a single entity.

“Maelstrom would like to congratulate Ben Allen on this grant,” said Arthur Hayes, Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom. “The great thing about Payjoin, is that if only a small amount of adoption is achieved, it breaks a key assumption used by financial surveillance companies. The assumption they have is that if a Bitcoin transaction has multiple inputs, all the inputs must all belong to the same entity. Therefore, Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don’t use it. We are excited to support Ben Allen’s work on open-source tools and software to increase Payjoin adoption.”

Payjoin technology, designed to enhance privacy and scalability, has seen limited integration despite being proposed in 2019. To encourage broader adoption, Allen will be working alongside Dan Gould to expand the Payjoin implementation so it can be integrated into more Bitcoin wallets.

Allen acknowledged the technical complexities of the project—including the requirement for receivers to be online—but expressed optimism about overcoming these challenges.

“I’m deeply grateful to Arthur Hayes and Maelstrom for generously providing me with this grant to support my work on the Payjoin Dev Kit project,” said Allen.

“With this funding, I can dedicate myself full-time to enhancing the Payjoin implementation, improving testing, and ensuring that the dev kit remains robust, well-documented, and maintainable for the future.”

He also noted the broader mission of his work: “Improving privacy for bitcoin is an area where continued improvement allows for a better experience by empowering users to control their financial data and foster greater peace of mind when using bitcoin day to day. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to Bitcoin’s privacy and scalability, and I’m looking forward to continuing to collaborate with the community to make Payjoin more widely adopted.”

Maelstrom, which is focused on supporting digital asset infrastructure, is led by Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX. Through grants like this one, the firm is investing in the foundational tools that promote a more private, scalable, and decentralized Bitcoin ecosystem.