Payjoin Foundation receives 501©(3) status to fund bitcoin privacy

darko

Wed, February 18, 2026 at 11:45 PM GMT+9 1 min read

The Payjoin Foundation announced its designation as a 501©(3) non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service, effective July 23, 2025. The designation allows the organization to accept tax-deductible charitable contributions to fund open-source privacy protocols.

The foundation maintains a dedicated budget to recruit talent directly for deep technical work. This strategy bypasses the delays of external grant processes the organization termed “Bitcoin Grant Purgatory.”

“Having an organized foundation with a dedicated budget enables us to recruit talent to solve specific problems rather than recommend an external org make a grant to each individual contributor,” Payjoin lead maintainer Dan Gould said in the foundation blog post.

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OpenSats and Cake Wallet funded the formation of the entity. The resources support specific development efforts, such as the recent hiring of a developer to build Dart language bindings.

The foundation produces the Payjoin Dev Kit to advance practical privacy tools. The protocol breaks input ownership heuristics to obscure transaction history without relying on a central server.

Governance remains under a board of directors to ensure operations benefit the public rather than generating quarterly returns. Board member Satsie previously described the mission as a push to standardize transaction batching and silent payments.

Wallet providers including Cake Wallet and Bull Bitcoin have adopted the technology. Seth for Privacy, a vice president at Cake Wallet, noted that formal structures help protect contributors amid increasing legal scrutiny of privacy developers.

Bitcoin image via Unsplash (Valentin)

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