2021
501(c)(3) Public Charity
100% Pass-Through Grants
Not Publicly Disclosed (Donor Treasury)
Matt Odell, Gigi (Giuliano Portilla), and Openoms.
Matt Odell is a prominent Bitcoin privacy advocate, co-host of Tales from the Crypt and Sovereignist, and co-founder of the venture firm Ten31. His pedigree is defined by a strict commitment to cypherpunk principles, focusing on transaction privacy, self-custody, and censorship-resistant communication. Alongside co-founders Gigi and Openoms, he established OpenSats to solve the funding bottleneck for developers who build essential free and open-source software (FOSS) but refuse to monetize their platforms through advertising, equity dilutions, or user data tracking.
opensats.org
The Open-Source Funding Shield
OpenSats provides the essential financial infrastructure that sustains the development of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). To protect development from corporate capture, OpenSats administers three distinct funding pools. This segregated architecture ensures that public donations meant for development are never touched for administrative overhead, allowing for complete financial transparency.
Core Funding Pools
- General Fund: Direct grants for Bitcoin Core and Lightning developers.
- Nostr Fund: Grantees building the decentralized social protocol.
- Operations Fund: A separately funded pool covering 100% of internal overhead.
Technical Focus
- Protocol Security & Base Consensus
- L2 Layer & Scaling Implementations
- Censorship-Resistant Communication
- ZK-Header & Rollup Verification
Strategic Value
OpenSats keeps Bitcoinβs development roadmap independent and neutral. By providing peer-reviewed grants directly to individual contributors, it prevents large corporate sponsors from monopolizing the protocol’s engineering directions, preserving the software’s commitment to individual sovereignty and peer-to-peer resilience.
| Operating Fee | 0% (100% Pass-Through on Program Donations) |
| Legal Structure | Registered 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Public Charity |
| Jack Dorsey Grant | $10 Million (#StartSmall, May 2023) |
| Dorsey Split Details | $5M General Fund, $5M Nostr Fund, separate Ops support |
| Grantees Include | BTCPay Server, SeedSigner, Krux, Stratum V2, RoboSats |
| License Requirement | Permissive Open-Source (MIT, Apache 2.0, GNU GPL) |
The Pass-Through Mechanism: OpenSats can operate a strict no-cut policy on general public donations because its Operations Fund is financed independently by dedicated corporate sponsorships and targeted portions of large philanthropic endowments like Jack Dorsey’s #StartSmall fund.