Breez Receives HRF Grant for New Privacy Features

The Human Rights Foundation has selected Breez to receive 0.6587 BTC as a grant to develop new, privacy-enhancing features. We couldn’t be more grateful or more excited to get started.

The HRF selected us because they believe in Bitcoin, in its open, public, peer-centric foundations, and in how these features increase autonomy and hinder oppression. So do we, as the Breez technology demonstrates. For example: Breez uses Neutrino, a private way to keep mobile Lightning nodes synced to the network; swaps in Breez are trustless; we use highly private source routing; and we enable the Breez client to connect to other nodes. Privacy and autonomy aren’t values we just adopted; they’ve been guiding the development of Breez since the beginning.

Thanks to the HRF’s generous grant, we’ll be able to deliver the next functions on our privacy/autonomy to-do list even faster.

While we love reading users’ feedback about Breez, and it’s always great to read complimentary press and industry reviews about our Lightning platform, this grant is especially meaningful. As Alex Bosworth over at Lightning Labs recently wrote,

Working on LN, the people you talk to aren’t whales. They’re people who work across borders or need escape from broken currencies. Folks living in the most oppressive regimes. Marginalized workers shut out of financial systems.

Exactly. Lightning is helping people to fix what their oppressors have broken, to take control over their own destinies, and to build a future that no one can take away.

That’s the vision we share with the HRF, the potential the foundation sees in Bitcoin, and it’s what makes this grant worth so much more than two thirds of a bitcoin. The HRF has recognized our common values and uncompromising commitment, so they’re giving us a hand.

What are we going to do with the money? We’re going to ask you, our users and developer community, to give us a hand too.

A few weeks ago, we introduced a bounty for helping us to integrate LNURL-Pay. We already knew that many of our users wanted that functionality (and so did we), so the positive resonance and enthusiastic engagement from the community were no surprise.

Given the success of our first bounty, we’ve earmarked the HRF grant to fund three more focusing on powerful, privacy-enhancing functions. Here’s what we’ll be working on together:

1. NextCloud support for Lightning node backups:
   With the addition of NextCloud as a decentralized provider, Breez users will be able to host their own cloud servers and store their backups more privately than is currently possible with Google Drive and iCloud.
2. Tor support for Android and/or iOS:
   In addition to Neutrino, securing network communication with Tor will allow Breez users to access the network without disclosing their IP information and to connect to Tor-enabled servers.
3. Lightning login for matrix.org:
   Breez will be adding secured, encrypted messaging to our feature palette using the matrix.org protocol. The function will employ users’ unique Lightning node information to log in to matrix anonymously. The matrix protocol can even be extended to third-party identity providers, opening the door to an authentication provider resembling lnurl-auth.

Thanks again to Alex Gladstein and the team at HRF. We’re aiming to make you as proud as you’ve just made us!