Ten31 Makes Bitcoin Grant to FediMint for Further Development of Federated Chaumian Mints
Ten31 is excited to announce its latest bitcoin grant to FediMint in support of its research and development of federated Chaumian mints, which Ten31 believes could play an important role in helping scale bitcoin in a privacy preserving and user friendly way.
As discussed at Bitcoin 2022 (Obi keynote and elsirion panel), federated Chaumian mints could provide an open source, distributed, censorship-resistant custody layer for less technical bitcoin users, allowing competent technical leaders in a given community to create a multi-signature federation to process transactions for less technically competent community members. In addition, Chaumian mints have attractive privacy preserving properties through the use of blind signatures, as the mint operators do not know the number of users, their identities, account balances, or transaction history. Decentralizing private keys and improving privacy are central themes Ten31 strives to support within the bitcoin ecosystem (exemplified by its investments in Unchained Capital and Samourai Wallet), and Ten31 believes the development of federated blind mints can further advance these efforts and serve as a natural complement to existing scaling and privacy solutions.
Ten31 is an investment platform created with the express intention of investing in great bitcoin companies it believes will form the future foundation of the global economic and monetary infrastructure, and Ten31 is one of the most active investors supporting open source businesses. Ten31 is now investing out of its second fund, Low Time Preference Fund II, which is backed by a number of high quality individual bitcoiners, as well as bitcoin-oriented institutions such as Seetee and forward-thinking and aligned family offices and university endowments, among others.
In addition to its equity investments in bitcoin companies to support industry growth, a core part of Ten31’s mission is to support further ecosystem development by way of grants to the community. Ten31 pioneered a unique recurring funding mechanism by dedicating a portion of its management fees to support ongoing grants to developers and other contributors to the open source ecosystem. In 2021, Ten31 was a founding supporter of OpenSats and also gave a grant to Bitcoin Q+A for his contribution to education and content creation in the space. Ten31 has scaled its efforts to support the space in 2022, becoming the first sponsor of the Bitcoin Commons in Austin, TX (and providing a dedicated seat for a full-time developer to work out of the Commons), sponsoring the travel and accommodation of several developers to attend the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway this month, and now making a significant grant to FediMint.
As the Ten31 platform continues to grow, Ten31 will look to further scale its efforts in supporting ecosystem development through additional grants under this model.