The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has unveiled its latest round of Bitcoin Development Fund (BDF) grants, distributing more than 500 million satoshis across 16 projects worldwide, three of which have a direct footprint in Africa.

Announced on August 25, 2026, the round supports open-source Bitcoin and Nostr development, self-custody and wallet security, censorship-resistant messaging, mobile money-to-bitcoin integrations, and freedom tech education for people living under authoritarian regimes. The grants span Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, with a clear emphasis on providing people in repressive or financially excluded environments with a private, non-custodial path onto Bitcoin. HRF, a New York-based nonprofit founded in 2005 that focuses on closed societies, has increasingly positioned Bitcoin and censorship-resistant tools as civil liberties infrastructure — funding developers rather than advocating price or investment.

Since its launch in 2020, the BDF has granted a cumulative $12.2 million in BTC to 383 projects across 70 countries.

BitSpenda: Bridging Lightning and Mobile Money Across Africa

Cross-border money transfers across Africa remain slow, expensive, and dependent on intermediaries — a persistent pain point in a region where mobile money services like M-Pesa already handle everyday payments for hundreds of millions of people who often lack traditional bank accounts. BitSpenda is a non-custodial, account-free mobile money-to-bitcoin bridge enabling users in Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, and Ghana to send bitcoin from a Lightning wallet straight into a mobile money account, arriving in local currency on the other end. HRF's grant will help BitSpenda expand these payment tools to make cross-border transfers faster, cheaper, and more accessible across the region.

Bitzed: A Self-Custodial On-Ramp for Zambia

Mobile money is widely used in Zambia, but buying bitcoin has typically meant going through banks or centralized exchanges that keep identity records and control users' assets. Bitzed, built by Bitcoin educator Humphrey, connects Zambia's mobile money networks directly to Bitcoin, letting users buy with their existing mobile money accounts and receive funds straight into their own Lightning wallet. HRF's support will help extend this self-custodial on-ramp to more Zambians shut out of traditional banking and exposed to financial repression.

Hack4Freedom: Training Women to Build Freedom Tech

Women in Africa and Latin America are often excluded from the technical training needed to contribute to freedom tech. Hack4Freedom, created by Evento founder Brianna Honkawa d'Estries, is a two-week developer education program training women in Africa and Brazil to build on Bitcoin and other open-source freedom tech, with cohorts running in Lagos, Nairobi, and São Paulo. HRF's grant will cover event and travel costs, opening up new opportunities for women to build financial and digital freedom tools.

Also worth noting: My First Bitcoin, a global free-education network active in more than 40 countries including Uganda, will use its HRF grant to roughly double its trained educators from 60 to 120 — many of them serving communities under authoritarian rule.

The Other 13 Grantees

The remaining grantees span Bitcoin development, Nostr messaging, mining decentralization, and education. Nostr — a decentralized, censorship-resistant communications protocol often used alongside Bitcoin — accounts for a substantial share of this round's toolkit projects:

• Project Island Resilience (Jamaica/Caribbean) – building offline Bluetooth, NFC, and e-cash payments into the Flash wallet for use during protests and internet shutdowns.
• Libbitcoinkernel – extracting Bitcoin Core's security and consensus rules into reusable modules for developer yuvicc.
• A Node in Every Wallet: Utreexo Wallet Integrations (Floresta) – a lightweight embeddable Bitcoin node, backed for developer Luis Schwab.
• BDK-Dart – a Flutter-based Bitcoin wallet toolkit, supported for developer John Osezele.
• WalletScrutiny – audits Bitcoin wallet apps to verify they match their open-source code.
• Vector – a Nostr-based encrypted messenger expanding to iOS, desktop, and voice/video calls.
• Flotilla Chat – a Discord-style, censorship-resistant platform built on Nostr by the Coracle team.
• OpenAlert – a decentralized emergency alert system built on Nostr.
• 0xchat – a Nostr messaging app with Tor integration and a built-in Cashu wallet.
• 256 Foundation – open-sourcing Bitcoin mining hardware and software to reduce centralization.
• Agora (Venezuela) – a Nostr/Bitcoin activist coordination platform running a 9-month civic infrastructure pilot.
• HODL: Hands On Design Lab (India) – training early-career UI/UX designers for Bitcoin apps.

HRF did not disclose the individual grant amounts awarded to each project.