The Nostr Fund

The Nostr Fund is the pool of money OpenSats earmarks for nostr work. It pays grants to relay operators, client developers, library maintainers, designers, and protocol-level contributors who keep nostr running without a corporate stack underneath it.

Past grants from this fund have gone to nostr clients on iOS, Android, web, and desktop, to multiple relay implementations, to long-term support stipends for senior protocol developers, and to design work that makes nostr usable for people who are not already comfortable with the protocol. The list of related announcements below shows who we have funded recently.

If you're working on nostr and your project needs funding to keep moving, you can apply for a grant from this fund at opensats.org/apply. The same form covers nostr work and Bitcoin work; the board routes each application to the relevant pool. You can see what we funded in the past by reading through our grant announcements, and what these projects shipped recently via OpenSats' Heartbeat.

OpenSats is a US 501(c)(3) public charity, and the Nostr Fund runs inside that structure rather than as a separate organization. Cumulative payouts, our bylaws, and year-end reports are linked from the transparency page.

Donate to the Nostr Fund if you want your money locked to nostr work. We started this fund in 2023 with a contribution from Jack Dorsey's #startsmall and have been growing it from community donations since. Donations from US taxpayers are tax deductible.