Bitcoin developer Ben Allen receives $100,000 grant to develop Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool

The system allows Bitcoin (BTC) senders and receivers to use batched transactions, with positive implications for scalability and privacy.

Bitcoin developer Ben Allen has secured a $100,000 grant from investment firm Maelstrom to support the development of Payjoin, a privacy-focused tool that also aims to improve Bitcoin’s scalability.

Announced on May 20, Maelstrom will be funding Allen’s work on his Payjoin devkit alongside Dan Gould. The system allows Bitcoin (BTC) senders and receivers to use batched transactions, with positive implications for scalability and privacy.

Payjoin was first proposed by Nicolas Dorier in 2019 in Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) 78. The core principle behind the system is that both senders and receivers may contribute inputs to a transaction.

“Namely that privacy is enhanced and improved consolidation of transaction outputs is achieved, benefiting scalability ,” a Maelstrom statement reads.

A Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that grantees are paid monthly for a total of $100,000 per year in Bitcoin and Allen’s grant will last one year. There are no concrete milestones and the grant is managed on a hands-off approach.

Payjoin: Soon in wallets near you?

Allen will be working on improving Payjoin implementations, with the clear objective being to make it possible for the feature to be added to more wallets. He added that the funding will allow him to work on the project full time.

The announcement notes that the system presents challenges, with the receiver needing to be online and the payment communication flow being more complex than normal non-interactive Bitcoin transactions.

Maelstrom chief investment officer and BitMEX crypto exchange co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes said that “improving financial privacy in Bitcoin is extremely important.”

“Despite the closure of CoinJoin services, the community continues to innovate and develop new privacy-enhancing technologies, such as Payjoin, zkSNACKs, and ZK-rollups, to ensure that users can maintain control over their financial data and transactions,” Hayes added.

A Maelstrom representative explained to Cointelegraph that the firm “is keen to support more grantees in the privacy area.” The company is actively seeking candidates who have a strong track record in Bitcoin privacy projects.

Enjoy the benefits whether you use it or not

Hayes noted that “Payjoin adoption improves the privacy of even the people who don’t use it.”

Allen said he believes privacy is important for Bitcoin users to enjoy a better experience and control their financial data when using it daily.

“I'm currently building out benchmarks to help downstream developers implement Payjoin in individual wallet software as well as expanding test coverage to ensure consistent and reproducible code. We're also working on making it easier to use and embed Payjoin in other projects. Encouraging its adoption is the biggest step we can take for simplifying the experience and encouraging Payjoin adoption by moving the complexities mostly away from the user,” Allen told Cointelegraph.

The Maelstrom representative told Cointelegraph that “a key metric for Payjoin success would be adoption by popular open source Bitcoin wallets.”

“In particular if the BitcoinCore wallet ever adopts it, that would be a huge signal of success,” they added.