SLP278 Matt Odell & Ben Price – OpenSats: Bitcoin & Open Source Initiative

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OpenSats is a new initiative for the bitcoiners to contribute to, to support Bitcoin and open source development and projects. Matt Odell and Ben Price join me to chat about the structure, why they’re creating a new organization, and why Bitcoin development funding shouldn’t merely be a popularity contest. 

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Other relevant episodes:

Sponsors: 

Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Ben and Matt, welcome to the show.

Ben Price:

Thanks man. I’m excited to be here.

Matt Odell:

Pleasure as always.

Stephan Livera:

Awesome. So Matt, everyone knows you, but Ben, tell us about yourself.

Ben Price:

Oh, that’s a broad question, Stephan. Let’s see. I I’m I guess we’ll start kind of back at childhood, I grew up in North Carolina, so I’m a good Southern boy, I guess. Went to chapel hill. So UNC go Tar Heels. There’s actually quite a few Tar Heels in the space, so that’s cool. Graduated. Studied economics realized like way after I graduated. It wasn’t really learning economics, but kind of like the standard public school version, which is very pro Keynesian. But kind of taught myself how to code after school. Dove into the tech space, did some consulting, did some startup work and then found Bitcoin.

Ben Price:

And at that point I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew it had to be something in the field related to Bitcoin. So kinda like threw my resume out there to the world visa crypto decided to pick me up, worked there for a couple years and recently left this January to start opensats and to create my own start up, so that’s a very condensed version of what about me?

Stephan Livera:

Cool. So, opensats is a cool idea and yeah. I want us to chat with you guys to get your point of view. Like why are you doing this? What’s it all about? So what was it that made you guys see the need for this opensats initiative?

Ben Price:

I guess I’ll start here. Matt can kind of jump in. I think he was one of the first people I reached out to, but back in August of 2020, I think I was playing around with BTCPay server and trying to create a, just like a stupid little website that sold. I think it was just like t-shirts, or I can’t even remember what I was trying to sell, but I just wanted to donate all the proceeds to core developers. I didn’t want to have to worry about taxes or any of that stuff. So I’m just going to give everything back and didn’t really have anywhere that seemed like a good option to just give to there was GitHub sponsors. So that probably would have been what I used, but at the time I reached out to Matt, reached out to a few other people and asked around like thought maybe I was just like, not in the know but it didn’t, there really didn’t seem to be any kind of charities or nonprofits that were kind of distributing funds on behalf of people that wanted to donate.

Ben Price:

And so whether it was smart or not, I kinda just decided like how hard could it be? And [i] talked to Matt reached out to a few other people and decided to spin it up.

Matt Odell:

Let me jump in here. So Ben reached out he was like a listener of the podcast, a big fan of your work. Complete Nym — had no idea who he was [so in] 2020 he said exactly what he just told you. And at that point it’s important to realize we didn’t have Brink yet, and we didn’t have HRF yet. So there was no 501c3 where you could donate to Bitcoin developers. And I turned to him this complete nym and I was like, it seems like a good idea, Ben. It also seems like a massive regulatory headache. I don’t want to deal with it.

Matt Odell:

I will help you in any way I can possibly help you without having to deal with any of that paperwork. I was like, I do not want to deal with any of that paperwork. And then I started talking to Dennis Reimann and we built Bitcoindevlist.com so that I didn’t have to deal with any regulatory paperwork everything’s passed. Like nothing gets touched by a central entity. It’s just their own BTCPay servers and their own GitHub sponsor pages. And what happened was it quickly became obvious that people wanted a way to give to a managed fund that they could just trust who was in charge there to make appropriate allocation decisions. They wanted basically like a group of plebs to be deciding where their donations would go. And they really liked the idea of giving a reoccurring donation.

Matt Odell:

So the idea of giving $50 a month to a managed fund and having them donate to open source development. And so basically the market approved of what Ben said. They basically demanded opensats. And it’s just been a long road since then. And I’m pretty excited that we’re finally launching.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, that’s cool. So let me fill in some of the context there, and I’ve had a similar experience as well in terms of my listeners reaching out to me saying, oh, Hey man, I want to donate, but who to, and then I might sort of give them a name or two, but the reality is if somebody is interested in Bitcoin, but not necessarily deeply into this Bitcoin world, or maybe they’re not a technical person, they might look at that list, say Bitcoindevlist.com and not know who they want to give money to and so I think that’s actually reflected in my own experience with my listeners reaching out to me on who should I give to and things like that. So I’ve definitely seen that as well.

Matt Odell:

It’s overwhelming and it turns into a popularity contest. There’s like one or two devs that get the majority of donations because people get overwhelmed and they just do the obvious ones. And then there’s a ton of projects that just are hurting for money. And if they just got a little bit of money, it would go a really long way.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Right.

Ben Price:

Yeah. And backing up a little bit, credit where credit’s due. I think ironically or funnily, or I don’t know, but it tested my willpower because about a week after I said “Screw it, I’m going to start this.” I think HRF privacy fund launched like a couple months later launched. And so I was just like, am I just repeating what’s in the space? And maybe the answer is, yes, I think we have a nice little niche. But Matt, I basically hit up Matt and he was just like, “Is this even worth it?” And so he was, he said we got to distribute, we got to keep everything decentralized, talked to a couple of other people in the space. Steve Lee was really influential early on. And we just talked about how all funding should be distributed. And so he, gave me a little more willpower to continue pushing because it was a little bit harder than I thought to launch this and you know, seeing HRF and Brink and some of the other great organizations in the space come out, it tested my conviction a little bit early on. But luckily Matt was there.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. But I think you made the right call and as Steve Lee has mentioned, I think actually on my podcast, he’s mentioned this as well. This idea of having multiple development organizations, not just relying on say Blockstream or chaincode labs. We’ve got MIT DCI, there’s individual sponsors and donor people out there. There are exchanges donating. Now we’ve got HRF, we’ve got brink. Now we have opensats and square crypto. Another big one.

Matt Odell:

These are all relatively recent, it’s kind of great that we have all of this happening so quickly because there is kind of a scary, vulnerable period, right? Where you might only have like one or two while you’re bootstrapping and to get past that is very important. It seems like we’re almost past that hurdle.

Ben Price:

There was also another piece where I think some, you guys touched on, if you’re maybe not extremely technical, or even if you’re deep in the weeds, you still might not know exactly who’s doing what or who to give to. And I think honestly, I fall into that category, which is why I tried to bring on a bunch of people who are smarter than myself, who can help make that direction of funds. But I think in my talks with a lot of the exchanges, a lot of the people who I was asking kind of for early funding, one weird niche that I wasn’t expecting was the fact that they kind of liked an arm’s length organization because I think honestly speaking, Bitcoiners can be a little bit controversial and some — more than others are hard to like directly associate your brand name with, even if you love what the work they’re doing, even if they’re doing amazing things for the community and the world, it might be a little risky to like, just give them a hundred thousand.

Ben Price:

And so I think having a kind of intermediary organization that sits in between, and really has no real conflict of interest, or isn’t trying to make money in any way, shape or form, we can really just give people controversial or not money to do great work. And I think that’s an added benefit for a lot of organizations who might have a stockholders and shareholders to please.

Stephan Livera:

Right. You’re providing a middleman service. Where actually a middleman service is required in some cases, right. People like to attack the idea of middlemen, but in some cases, well, generally speaking in a free market, if there is a middleman, there’s a reason that person exists. There’s a reason that person is there. So that’s interesting as well now, of course, going back a few years, there was some of the earlier drama, which I’m sure people you know, maybe some of the newer listeners might not be familiar with that, but historically there was a bit of a concern around the scene called the Bitcoin foundation.

Stephan Livera:

And then in 2018, there was another one — we had another flare up on this similar kind of drama called the B. Right. And so the concern at that time from the community was something like these people are claiming to speak for Bitcoin quote unquote. And they’ve got all these influencers on their side and et cetera, where I think now the environment has, because now there are multiple organizations. What are you guys seeing?

Matt Odell:

So let me just jump in here real quick. We’re very cognizant of that concern. I remember I was very outspoken against the Bitcoin foundation a little bit about the B but less so, I mean, I think it was definitely a different environment. There’s a lot more teams out there doing this kind of work. I think a couple of things to be absolutely clear about first of all we have no intention of speaking for Bitcoin. The mission of the actual organization is purely funding open source contributors. So it’s actually not only Bitcoin. We will not be funding, shitcoiners at all. But we will be funding parallel, open source projects that could help Bitcoin things like secure messaging or like a tour replacement, stuff like that. So the idea isn’t actually necessarily the focus, the whole mission, isn’t just Bitcoin. The mission is basically taking our sats and weaponizing our sats to make the world that we want to see. And I think that this is also something to keep in mind here of how we’re different from the other organizations. A lot of these other organizations are more corporate, they’re more, more highly focused on Bitcoin. We are a hundred percent pass through. We’re not taking a cent, no one on our board is getting paid any money for this.

Matt Odell:

I mean, you said like there’s a reason there’s a middleman because of a free market. There’s no free market here. We’re just we’re doing this because it’s a very important mission. We have a nine, nine person board made up of big corners that have very strong reputations in the space and all decisions will go through this board. It will be highly transparent. So people see what is happening there. And then last but not least what I think is really cool, that that makes us different is that even though we will be accepting credit card donations, which by the way, ledger will be sponsoring the processing fees. So we’re not even losing the processing fees. If you donate a hundred dollars through credit card, we get the full hundred dollars. All of those proceeds are getting converted into sats as soon as we receive any fiat.

Matt Odell:

So all donations will be held as sats and all grants will be given as sats. So we are very aligned with the community in that respect.

Ben Price:

So there’s a couple of things I want to add. Matt said, there’s no free market. I would argue the opposite. Like there’s absolutely a free market as where you want to send your funds is absolutely your choice. If you want to. There is a general fund where we’ve put together a great board of Bitcoiners. Who’s whose reputation kind of, I think defines them. But there’s what I hope is that we’re making little to no decisions. I think a lot of people are going to donate to the general fund.

Matt Odell:

You’re completely wrong. The general fund is going to be the majority.

Stephan Livera:

I’m with Matt. I think it will be general fund as well, but go on make your case.

Ben Price:

So I hate that idea. I think everyone has like a slightly differing opinion on the board, which is why it’s healthy, but we’re building a platform where my initial vision was I guess, to build a platform, the board would kind of pre-approve, vet projects, make sure there’s no, like shitcoinery going on. And as long as you’re contributing to a free and open project, like Bitcoin core or something ancillary that kind of supports the technology to reach its fullest potential, then you’ll get approved to get listed for our site. And anyone can directly kind of say, I want to fund this project. And so I’m hoping that’s where a lot of kind of donations go through where people pick and choose. And then the board has no say it’s really just you know, if you want to donate to the Tor foundation and the people working on that, or if you want to donate to BTCPay server, or if you really love the idea of taproot or some other kind of BIP, you can donate specifically to that now.

Ben Price:

Again, I think there’s going to be a lot of organizations that kind of keep their hands off and are going to rely on the board to determine where the money might go, the furthest. And I think honestly, we’ve put together an amazing board. And then yes, Stephan, you mentioned one thing where there’s like, when there’s a middleman, there’s usually a reason. I think I remember back in like fifth grade or fourth grade, my mom always used to make us throw out all our crap to Goodwill. And when I learned one day that the CEO of Goodwill, which is a charity and at least where I grew up, was making like a million dollars a year. I was just so angry. And so like one of the core things that I started this on was like, it had to be a hundred percent pass through.

Ben Price:

I didn’t want anyone to make any money. You know, I wanted it to be just like completely transparent. And I think there’s some other organizations that are doing an amazing job, but we all know, we all know some charities that just take so much off the top. And so our goal from day one, most importantly, was be a hundred percent pass-through and that was really hard to accomplish, but luckily we’ve had some amazing sponsors. Some people like silvergate are waiving all of our banking fees, other people like river are waiving all of our kind of Fiat to Bitcoin conversions [fees]. Matt mentioned Ledger is picking up Fiat credit card processing fees. Cause God knows the banks wouldn’t waive those. Other than Silvergate, which like shout out to them. They did a good job, but you know, luckily all these people in the space who have made a killing off of Bitcoin and the open source developers that support it, they’ve been willing to give back and shout out to everyone for that.

Matt Odell:

nodl cloud we’re using nodl cloud for our backend. They’re going to also be hosting the website.

Ben Price:

Yeah. BTCPay server obviously, like they, we didn’t even have to ask them. We’re using their tech.

Matt Odell:

CoinKite is a founding partner with us [as well as] BottlePay. But ultimately, what I want to see is the weaponization of the plebs. Like I want to see if we can get a thousand, 2000 plebs to give us $50, $25 a month. Then all of a sudden we’re not wed to any kind of corporate sponsors which I think would be pretty cool. We’ll still get the corporate donations hopefully, and we’ll still be encouraging them. But it’d be cool if we just had this base. And I think it’s something that the other organizations aren’t really even attempting to address. So I think it’s a nice little niche for us.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, even in like a religious context, sometimes people tithe for their church, right? So it’s kind of like a, you might be a stacker and you’re out there stacking Bitcoin, and then you tithe a small amount to keep the system running and to keep the thing developing and to keep for example, I know that’s always been a focus in terms of Bitcoin core contributions. They’re always looking for more people who are able to proactively engage and review the code and write tests and all of these kinds of things that can be historically, that can be difficult to find someone with that skillset.

Matt Odell:

And it’s like specifically, we’re tapping into that flow, right? Because Stephan, Ben, like we know that auto stacking flow is something that a lot of people have become comfortable with and that’s how they like to interact with Bitcoin. Well, now we’re making it so you can auto stack directly into a dev fund. Right? And so you have a portion for that and you have a portion for yourself. I feel like conceptually, it’s very easy for people to understand. And just one thing I would add is just huge props to the seven other bitcoiners that are on the board with us. I mean we’ve had a lot of work so far. I think we’re going to have a lot more work ahead of us. I’m not sure if we all are aware of what we signed up for. I kind of was just like bullish. Let’s go. But I think it’s really important to give back. And it’s important that people that are in leadership positions and have an audience provide a proper example to everyone else because ultimately this movement is bigger than all of us know.

Ben Price:

I just want to get this out of the way as well before we miss anyone. Some of the early people that supported us Shakepay, Coinkite, Greg Foss, Jeremy Rubin, John Pfeffer, Ledger, nodl, Silver Gates, SwanBitcoin, Ten31. Who’s actually this new kind of Bitcoin VC fund, that’s donating their management fees kind of in a DCA fashion. So longterm they’re contributing their 2 and 20 or whatever percent they’re taking. And then especially shout out to castlenine, who is he’s I think CTO of Duxreserve. He’s been helping build the entire website, the entire donation platform. So like amazing work on his part. He’s contributed all his time for free. And then a couple of anonymous people who don’t want to be named, but we have an accountant that’s doing all the backend work. We already have a lawyer that stepped up to do pro bono and a designer friend of mine who doesn’t wish to be named also has been helping on that front.

Ben Price:

So like there’s a lot of other people that have really supported and helped. This community is amazing. And I just wanna make sure we get that out of the way. So now we can talk about whatever we want and no one will feel guilty about it.

Stephan Livera:

Well. I mean. If we were to rewind the clock one or two years, there were discussions about this kind of thing, but it was always, ah, there’s like, there’s a whole process around trying to get 5013 charity status so that the donation is now tax deductible, because that was the other thing. People who wanted to give fiat wanted to get the tax deduction for that. So I’m sure there has been a lot of work on the part of you guys and the supporting people who you just mentioned to get that right?

Ben Price:

Big disclaimer though. We are 501c3 pending. We are incorporated in North Carolina as a charitable organization. So all donations given that we get approved by the IRS, which I think we will, they will be tax deductible retroactively. But as of today, as of this recording, we are not technically a 501c3.

Matt Odell:

So just to add on here. That is the path that bring took. Square crypto — I don’t think is 501c3 and HRF was already 501c3 from their human rights aspect. And then they bridged it in. So we’re going to bring path. To be clear here, Stephan, you said people want their Fiat donations to be tax-deductible actually the big pole is an after a big bull market and people have big Bitcoin gains.

Matt Odell:

They want their Bitcoin direct donations to be 501c3. But I actually think, and I said this to Ben, but Ben is really — he’s been really gung ho about 501c3 since the beginning. So I’ve just gone along with it. But I said to Ben — I said to you from the very beginning, I think it doesn’t really matter. I think ultimately I don’t care. I’ve been giving through GitHub sponsors, just auto stacking to devs through credit card or whatever, just like automatic, because it was easy. And I don’t care about the donations like the tax deductibleness part of it, I think. And it’s only in the United States anyway, that we get 501c3.

Ben Price:

And the further we go in, the more I’m actually on that side about this, almost all of the enterprises that I talk to, I’ve talked to a few big exchanges, none of which have jumped in yet. So if you’re out there you know, who you are and you know, who I’m talking to, but most of them have basically said like we have creative ways to write this off, whether it’s funding X, Y, or Z development. And then like personally, and I think I don’t speak for everyone, but I know at least a few other friends who are donating 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks here, there, I’ve never claimed like an itemized tax deduction. So I really don’t care about the $50 a month donations. I think it’s that weird middle ground of people who are maybe giving specifically doing this for tax deductability and I think if we see a really big Bitcoin bull run, that might be when 501c3 donation starts to matter a little more, but I do think 90-ish percent of people probably won’t be deducting there probably be a lot of anonymous donations.

Ben Price:

I haven’t heard one corporate like kind of person who has like specifically mentioned that as a problem. So I think it’s just going to be a weird niche use case that hopefully we can help solve. But yeah, surprisingly, it hasn’t come up in too many conversations.

Matt Odell:

It’s like, if you donate through credit cards in small amounts, it’s like, who cares? And then if you donate to Bitcoin, it just feels counterintuitive to Bitcoin that like right now with HRF, I was talking to our buddy Gladstein over there about it. And like, if you want to tax deductible Bitcoin donations through them, you pay their BTCPay server. And then you basically like reach out to them and ask for a receipt that like KYCs your Bitcoin to donation. It just, it feels antithetical to Bitcoin. It’s like, I might as well just give fiat at that point instead of doing that process. So…

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Right. So I think this would be in the case where they are a HODLer and obviously we’ve just gone through a bull run and then they don’t want to have a tax event because if they donate and then there’s also a tax event, it’s going to be like double whammy for them to make that donation. So I think that’s — for some people they might want to donate 20, 30, 50K and not have to pay the Bitcoin and also have a tax event on that. And I think that’s what it’s solving for some people. And it may be that there’s a bunch of maybe not super wealthy, but call it high net worth Bitcoin HODLers out there who want to donate, but they just don’t want a double whammy hit when they donate. That’s all.

Ben Price:

There’s two use cases. I’ve actually seen that a 501c3 would be especially beneficial. And the first is when, like you just said, when you want to donate, let’s just say a hundred K. And you have you can either sell your Bitcoin and have a capital gains event and then donate a hundred thousand dollars in Fiat, or you can just donate your Bitcoin directly and not actually have to cash out. And there’s no capital gains. And so that actually you can actually send a lot more value to the charity in that case. And then the second reason I’ve actually seen, which is really clever. And I think I’ve read about this from the guys over at the giving block, which maybe I can send you the link, but it was just like a quick writeup, but you can actually raise your cost basis of your Bitcoin funds without like taking any hit.

Ben Price:

So the idea here, and you might have to like slow this down if you’re listening to 2x speed or whatever. But essentially if you want to donate 10K of Bitcoin, what you can do is you can donate your lowest cost basis coins, and then take that like $10,000 tax write off and then buy Bitcoin today with $10,000 in fiat, which you would have otherwise donated and raise your cost basis to whatever it is today. So there are a lot of people who are kind of you know, cleverly not paying the IRS.

Stephan Livera:

Well I mean, if it’s legal, I think people should know about it, right. Because this may be a way that people can otherwise minimize their tax burden and still maximize their sat stacking while donating. It might actually be a real big benefit there for people out there. So [it’s] well, worth looking into, for those of you who are perhaps in that situation where maybe a lot of your sats are KYCed and you can legally kind of do this strategy. It might actually help you that way.

Ben Price:

You can always donate anonymously.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Well, that too. Yeah. So let’s chat a little bit about some of the different skillsets and areas, and actually that’s the other thing. So if somebody is looking on the website, and I don’t know, things are early right now, we don’t have like all the projects up there, but are you thinking that you might have different pools that a person can donate into? So you might have the general one and then you might have Bitcoin core, or like what’s the plan there around how to give people a choice in what they donate to?

Ben Price:

So I think there’s a lot of long-term plans and there’s a lot of short term plans, I think right now we’re just trying to get any sort of, kind of marketplace up. So we want, we want people to be able to donate directly to the projects that the board has approved that are good for Bitcoin or good for the world that support our charitable cause and mission of supporting free and open source contributors. And so we’re going to get a bunch of projects pre listed there, and then the alternative is donate to the general fund, which we will give out in the form of kind of grants on a quarterly basis. And then long-term, I think the goal is kind of what Matt and team did there at Bitcoindevlist, which is we’re actually already open sourced our pre-launch site.

Ben Price:

But the idea is whenever we get the platform live there’s already been a ton of feature requests. So there’s this kind of weird problem where, what if there are multiple contributors to one project? How are we distributing funds? And honestly, like, we’re just trying to build something. And so there’s going to be a lot of probably issues. There’s going to be a lot of areas to improve. So there’s gonna be a lot of features that we could use community help to build out. But one big thing that I’m really excited about is kind of like an initiatives page or a GoFundMe style page where opensats can choose a project like Bitcoin beach maybe. And we can say, we want to raise 10K for that. Or maybe it’s a teacher in some country that is teaching kids how to code on Bitcoin core and they need laptops.

Ben Price:

And if that’s an initiative we want to support, then we can kind of launch a specific project there. And so we can kind of pick and choose. And that way we can pre-list and approve projects where people come and apply to our site, or we can give grants directly. And that’s what we have in mind so far, but honestly, who knows, like this has all happened within eight months. So I’m sure there will be plenty of amazing community recommendations. And I’m just hoping people chip in and just build the things they want to see.

Stephan Livera:

That’s cool. And I also liked the, as you mentioned earlier, it’s going more Bitcoin native, right? Because everything is converted into Bitcoin and grants are being given in Bitcoin terms. Now, I think the obvious question is, if you’re a hardcore orange pill person, you don’t care, you’ll just deal with the volatility, but for someone who’s maybe just starting on their Bitcoin journey, they might feel this volatility, right? And,even this week or so, we’ve seen the drop from 60K down to whatever 30K or so at the bottom, for people who are new, that’s a big deal, right? To go through a 50% drop. How’s that going to work from a grants perspective and trying to figure out the amounts and so on.

Ben Price:

Yeah. I mean, one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, Stephan. That’s what we think. There’s, always going to be weeks in draw downs, but if you zoom out a little bit, which I think almost every open source contributor has the ability to do, I mean, hell they’re contributing their time freely for something that probably a lot of people will never even see their name on. So the goal here is to make sure that we maximize what we can in the longterm. And I think like if you’re asking me even with the Fiat drawdown, I think most of these people are probably going to try and HODL any funds they receive. So I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of conversion back to Fiat. On the other side of this, that being said, we are trying to automate, being a hundred percent pass through we’re trying to automate everything. So silver gate is our bank. The second we receive any Fiat donations, we are attached to the silver gate exchange network, which is this cool thing that lets you move money 24/7 to cryptocurrency exchanges and our partner River we’re going to be moving Fiat off our balance sheet as fast as possible.

Ben Price:

And yes, that means during weeks like this technically our Fiat value will go down, but our Bitcoin stays the same. And that’s really what we care about and what I think our contributors care about it.

Matt Odell:

There’s a couple of things here, right. You know, first of all, you’ve got to start somewhere, right. And I think we’re all trying to make this Bitcoin circular economy a reality. We’re all living in a world where we want to see sats become the standard. So we want to practice what we preach, right? And so grants will be paid out in sats exclusively. Like if a project doesn’t want to receive sats then they should go to some other organization. Those contributors, those projects, they can go and they can convert sats to their local currency. They can do whatever they want with it. After that, then it’s their sats, right. They can do whatever they want. So if they want to hedge themselves, they can hedge themselves. As an organization. We will probably never be sitting on large amounts of funds to begin with. But if we are, I think the upwards price movements of Bitcoin is a net benefit. Like we can see a situation — I dealt with one thing that was really cool that I think Jack Dorsey did it. It was it with Jay Z, he did the African donation fund.

Stephan Livera:

I think he gave, was it 50 BTC or 500? I don’t remember.

Matt Odell:

Right. So he gave 50 Bitcoin like that endowment of 50 Bitcoin could just last forever. if number keeps going up right? As we expect it to, it could end up being one of the largest endowments in the world at the end of the day. So I think it behooves us to participate in that potential, practice what we preach. And also just on top of it as a Bitcoiner, if I’m giving fiat to an organization that’s supposed to be a Bitcoin first organization, I think it’s kind of cool that they’re providing upward price. Pressure as my donations are coming in, like, I just think that’s like a little aspect that like, sure, like if you’re a pre-coiner and you’re not exposed to Bitcoin yet, you might think that as a negative. Like, why are you taking transaction fees when the US dollar is the best money in the world? You know? But as a bitcoiner, to me, that’s an extra selling point. If I’m going to donate to opensats versus GitHub sponsors versus direct to someone’s BTCPay with Bitcoin.

Matt Odell:

The fact that the organization is auto stacking with my donations would be a net positive.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, for sure.

Ben Price:

And we’ve already seen this actually shout out to Greg Foss who was actually the first person who tangibly kind of gave something and I’m not going to dox how much he gave or whatever, but it was way back when I kind of wanted to start this in August of last year, maybe September. And I reached out to him and no questions asked. He just sent over some Bitcoin. And I mean, you can kind of do the math yourself, what the price was in August, even after this massive drawdown of 50% in the last kind of week or so his donation has 3x or at least in Fiat terms. And had we distributed it a month ago it would have been 6 or 7x.

Ben Price:

And so I think long-term, we’re going to trend in the right direction by holding Fiat and yeah, I love… We’re just market buying. So any fiat that touches our account, we’re getting off it as fast as possible. We’re not setting limits, we’re not timing the market, we’re just smash buying. So I think like everyone can kind of relate to that.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, for sure.

Matt Odell:

And just another anecdote you know, HRF, I remember last year they gave one Bitcoin to three different open source contributors at the time it was $10,000. Right. And so the grants that keep on giving and I think pretty much all of us in this space have released operating on the assumption that we’re expecting Bitcoin to continue to go up substantially over time and we understand it’s going to be volatile short-term so, yeah. It is where it ends.

Stephan Livera:

In my discussions with people as well. I’ve seen as in on the recipient side, most of them are very happy to take Bitcoin. Right. So it’s really more just about for people who are new to the space and maybe they’re not as hardcore into it. That’s probably the kind of question that they might be thinking about. And I guess the answer is, well, we just deal with the volatility for now. We just stomach it and we know long-term it’s going up anyway. So yeah.

Ben Price:

The last piece is honestly the, we don’t have a lot of balance sheet risks, so because we’re automating everything and a lot of our banks, our fee like our payment processing, our development, our legal work, everything is kind of being contributed free of cost. And that’s really where you want to make sure you have enough Fiat for your short term Fiat liabilities.

Ben Price:

And we really don’t have any, the only thing is payment processing and we have a corporate sponsor luckily to pick that up. And so while our balance sheet might go down in Fiat terms, that really doesn’t affect our operations. And we can feel safe just knowing we’re HODLing Bitcoin. And honestly, that’ll work out for us more often than it doesn’t, but the automating operations and having people, you know not charge us for the work they do is really been helpful.

Matt Odell:

Two other aspects. I just want to jump in here before we move on. The bank keeps saying automated. One of the things that’ll be nice I’m expecting for this organization is if we do end up in a situation that I’m hoping for, where we have a thousand, 2000 plebs giving a constant amount month, it’s a nice situation to be in as a nonprofit because we have expected cashflow.

Matt Odell:

We know like what money’s going to come next instead of like one big grant from a whale or one big grant from an exchange that that might be in between like 10 weeks or 20 weeks between we get the next big one. So it’s kind of nice that we have this expected cashflow. And I said in the beginning circular economy. And just to explain that a little bit better for the listeners I think at scale, right, if we’re talking 2000, 3000 plebs are giving $50 a month, right? 3000 plebs giving us $50 a month, it’s $150,000 that is auto going into Bitcoin. And that is available for open source contributors that are outside of Bitcoin. Right? So all of a sudden at scale, you end up in a situation where open source contributors, some of the smartest people globally that are looking for money that are in projects that are helpful for Bitcoiners, but that are not exactly Bitcoin related.

Matt Odell:

It’s going to create an adoption wave among them because they’re going to need to learn how to accept Bitcoin if they want a grant from us. So if we’re offering them 25, $30,000 that they really need, they’re going to go out and figure out how to use Bitcoin and who knows, maybe their project ends up incorporating Bitcoin more. Maybe their next project is Bitcoin related. So I think it can create a really nice viral feedback loop because we’re going as Bitcoin only as I think reasonable possible right now, which is — we’re still accepting Fiat on the inroad, but that’s it. It’s just automatically converting to sats.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, I like that idea. And I certainly agree that there is a network effect benefits to having this as a Bitcoin focused organization. So when it comes to giving grants, there are different approaches I have seen. Some in the space, take “We’re going to pay you this grant for this specific outcome, or we want you to work on this specific thing” and then other people in the space, just take it as like “We know you’re working on Bitcoin core as a maintainer here’s money. You decide what you think is best.” What kind of approach are you guys looking at and how are you thinking about that?

Ben Price:

Right now, I think we’re still figuring it out. We’ve asked for a lot of feedback from the community, as well as our donors who have given to us already. As well as some of like, the enterprise level donors who might be given the bigger chunks and a couple of people have expressed kind of concern with the fully open model where it’s just give the money away and hope that the person keeps contributing.

Ben Price:

And some people like the idea of kind of having no strings attached. I think we’re trying to find a healthy middle ground. That being said, we don’t have all the answers here. We’re kind of iterating as we go along. But some of the few things that we think we can kind of at least that we’re putting into place now are we’re only going to be paying out, I think, in monthly kind of increments. And we are going to expect some sort of results from the developers or the contributors in, some sense. So we are going to be kind of tracking what you do. It’s not going to be, we’re not going to be like over your back hovering. But the idea is basically we would love like a monthly update or potentially a quarterly update, or we’d love you to help contribute to some community content or some sense of like giving back to the community.

Ben Price:

But I think it’s going to be an iterative thing. No one has the perfect solution and we’re not pretending like we do and this is my personal opinion. The reason we’ve got a huge board is because other people feel differently. But you know, I speak for myself here. I like the idea of trying to attach some milestones and things to any money given out and then kind of having some sort of baseline expectation of results. But again, Matt might feel totally differently and our seven other board members I’m sure have their own opinions and that’s kind of the beauty of it. And yeah. We have very strong opinions on our board.

Matt Odell:

I don’t think we’ve listed the board members yet. We’ll do that in a second, but I tend to agree with everything Ben said in the fact that I think it’s going to be iterative and we’re going to figure it out as we go. And we want the whole project to be as open as possible to resemble the open source community that we’re trying to support. So we’re going to be taking a lot of commentary in terms of reports, I really liked the aspect on GitHub sponsors that you can optionally give them your email and they can email you updates if you’re supporting them, which I think it makes you way more, it’s like a Patreon aspect where it makes you feel like way more involved with the process. And that’s not even like a policing updates thing. That just provides a better connection between the donor and the receiver of the donation. So that’s something that we’re going to work towards. I mean, it’s not going to be in the original in the beginning the beginning product that we have, but that’s the goal coming forward.

Matt Odell:

And then the other, the other thing that I wanted to add was that me personally, I like the idea of more, open-ended less strings attached donations. That’s just my personal preference. And I think the best way to mitigate concerns there about the donations not really going to a beneficial cause is that you keep them on the smaller side. So rather than giving out one huge donation, one huge grant, you give them smaller grants that are paid out over time. And then there’s more reputational risk on the line there, right? Like if they’re not doing something six months down the line, then the grants stop or something to that effect. But these, these, these details are all gonna be iterated.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, of course. So I guess just to spell out some of the different concerns and from different perspectives that I have seen, some developers in the space say, well, the kind of work I do, it doesn’t necessarily have a defined outcome, or it might be review time. And so maybe then the outcome is more, or they don’t want to have too many strings attached because they feel like that’s not really reflecting the actual work that they’ve done, or in other cases it might be, they [are] contributing to Bitcoin core, but Bitcoin core doesn’t necessarily have to take the other contributors, or let’s say the other reviewers or the maintainers of the project are saying, well, we don’t want that particular thing in, or things can get held up. And so that’s one of their concerns, but then, obviously on the donator side, they might want to feel like, “Oh, I’m paying for this certain outcome. How come I’m not getting…” So I guess that’s some of the different concerns that people might have. But I think at the end of the day, people still find a way to make it work. And maybe in some cases it will be tied to a specific project or in other cases it will be a bit more open-ended if that is what makes sense in that context.

Matt Odell:

Yeah. I think I think it’s going to be messy. I think that’s kind of unavoidable, but we’re going to try our best and we’re going to be as open as possible, which I think is the two main things you really have to do. And just to add there, I mean, one big concern I see from the dev community is this idea of stability that they don’t want to be rug pulled on their grant. They want to know [that] they’re going to be able to pay their rent and they’re going to be able to focus on this work. So it’s important for us to have a balance where we can provide the contributors, the recipients of the grants. We can provide them some stability and some certainty and give them good communication on our end. But at the same time, we’re going to have to keep them honest and that’s never going to be a clean process and we’re just going to have to do our best. And the board was selected as people that are more familiar with this kind of work and that are already in this world. And so hopefully it’ll provide a better communication. The incentives will be better aligned than some of the other attempts in the past.

Ben Price:

Yeah and early on, I did a lot of talking to some core devs specifically about how they would prefer to be funded and the overwhelming response that I got — it wasn’t unanimous. Like no things are in this community. But you know, most people did prefer to have kind of a steady stream of modest income that was predictable kind of plebs donating $50 a month in a recurring fashion rather than just maybe getting a 200k grant from an exchange or something along those lines. And so that’s really the model that we’re trying to replicate. For the most part, we will be giving out grants probably capping them to make sure that no one person or one project is like overfunded. And we leave anyone else behind. But I just think that like, again, the biggest thing we have to stress is we don’t know everything. We want community feedback. We want everyone to kind of voice their opinion and if you look at the board, like the reason I selected kind of everyone to come on is because I think everyone has — everyone, first of all, is an amazing Bitcoiner.

Ben Price:

And I think they’ll keep us honest and we’re just absolutely going to do our best and like that we can promise you, we can’t promise you we’re going to do it perfectly, but we’re definitely going to try and we’re not going to take a cent while we do it. So I think those are all important things.

Stephan Livera:

So speaking of the board, let’s talk a little bit about who is on the board, what kind of skillsets they have, what they are known for. Do you want to just talk a bit about that?

Matt Odell:

So on the board we have Janine your listener — has Janine been on the show yet?

Stephan Livera:

No, actually I do need to get her on at some point. Yeah.

Matt Odell:

So Janine’s a co-host of the Block Digest. One of the longest running Bitcoin shows, I mean, I think it’s been around forever and she has a huge privacy focus, tons of respect for her. She has this new — a month in-review Bitcoin privacy newsletter. That’s fantastic that everyone should go subscribe to.

Ben Price:

She was the one first that I thought we weren’t going to get. I thought she was going to be way too…

Matt Odell:

I didn’t think she would say yes for sure.

Ben Price:

Yeah. I can go down the list here. I’ve got it in front of me. So James O’Beirne is kind of an amazing Bitcoin core contributor. He just released some awesome work about I think it was — was it UTXO or… Matt I heard it on your latest TFTC [on] how the block sync was sped up. He did some work.

Stephan Livera:

assume UTXO is his one.

Ben Price:

Yeah. So essentially, James is an amazing Bitcoin core contributor. He’s on the board and extra shout out to James and anyone who is actually open source contributor.

Ben Price:

They’ve all agreed to not be funded through the organization. So while we hope to fund anyone, and everyone, we are trying to avoid conflict of interest. And so that means that anyone who jumped on board in a board capacity is not going to be receiving funding. So there’s James, who’s our Bitcoin core kind of person, Lisa Neigut. She’s, she’s really big at Blockstream and she’s a C lightning contributor, Matt Odell you know, he’s all right. Elaine Ou, she’s also kind of on the software side, but then we also have — I don’t know — some of these people don’t love their names going out there, so I’ll try and give their nyms — Dread which his Twitter tag is @polevaultdream. He kind of identifies as a global advocate for Bitcoin core.

Ben Price:

He was just down in El Salvador with Jack and Peter. He has been kind of reading up and figuring out the game plan for Bitcoin beach and figuring out how we can help replicate that in other cities and areas around the globe. Matt mentioned Janine who, I guess I have written down here, like investigative journalist. She’s an amazing privacy advocate, Ketan who Stephan I’m sure you know a lot about. Yeah. So he’s, he’s kind of our open source guru who he’s been helping manage our BTCPay. We’re trying to implement LNURL pay right now, which has been a huge pain or trying to get our QuickBooks integration going with BTCPay. So Ketan has been doing a lot of that work along with Elaine.

Speaker 1:

So shout out to them and then myself who’s probably the least impressive out of everyone. And then last but not least, we’ve got like our marketing evil genius.

Matt Odell:

Yeah leave the shit coiner to last, yeah.

Ben Price:

Udi. He kind of brings a little bit of character to the team and.

Matt Odell:

He’ll keep us all honest.

Ben Price:

Yeah. I’m trying to, I’m trying to get him to take over the Twitter account. So the world benefits from that, cause I’m not very funny. So I think Udi should, should take the reigns there soon.

Stephan Livera:

He can drive some engagement by trolling people. So in terms of projects, I mean, I guess bit more of an open question. What would you guys like to see in the Bitcoin and Lightning and privacy or other related technologies, what kinds of things do you want to see come to Bitcoin?

Ben Price:

This is where I think the board it’s going to differ all over the place and that’s what’s beautiful. I also think that the community is going to have differing opinions from us, which is why we want to allow you to donate specifically to the projects you want to see funded. Personally I really, really, really hate chain analysis. One of the main reasons I left visa is kind of the corporate lifestyle and the fact that they play really nice with banks and the regulators. You know, Bitcoin is here, it’s for everyone. And I’m all about the privacy tech. I love the projects that are really promoting that, the projects that allow people to join into this permissionless network in a bankless fashion without any like, kind of oversight from anyone.

Ben Price:

And so I’m going to be pushing hard on both privacy things. And then I think like if you kind of have a US centric view of things, things, get a little skewed and at least over here as I live in the states right now, at least, I think we all or some of us suffer from kind of US-based projects. But I think if you zoom out and try and have a global view, a lot of times sats or dollars or whatever you want to call it, funding goes a lot further in places overseas. And I think so far what I’ve seen from some projects in this space is maybe what I perceive as like over-funding kind of popular projects. And so I really hope that we can have like a global mindset really try and cap funding and spread it you know, wide as opposed to just a few people at the core who maybe we’ve all heard of, because there are so many people out there doing amazing things.

Ben Price:

And I just want to make sure maybe it’s a thousand dollars that really let someone spend the next few months on, on a project. And those are the kinds of people that I hope to push forward, but every single board member, everyone in the community is gonna have a different opinion. So I’m curious to hear what Matt says, actually.

Matt Odell:

Yeah. I mean the cool part about the board is it’s a lot of independent thinkers, so I expect a lot of spirited debate going forward. But I mean, I think any of the listeners that know me knows what I’m interested in and I just basically co-sign exactly what Ben said. He kind of just pulled the words right out of my mouth dissident tech, freedom stuff all the good stuff. Let’s help create the world that we want our children to live in.

Stephan Livera:

So from a privacy perspective, then what appeals to you guys, is it as an example, would it be getting more payjoin adoption into wallets out there so that you can break the heuristic? Or is it, you know having better or more coinjoin options? Is there anything in particular you guys like or you would want to see?

Matt Odell:

So we need more coinjoin tools. We need more payjoin adoption of course. I would love to see a wallet that for instance, as like coin joint in Lightning in the same wallet. I would love to see Lightning wallets that are more focused on the privacy side. Also one thing Ben didn’t mention that I know he agrees with me on that I would love to see is that I would love to see just easier UX and easier accessibility that doesn’t sacrifice on the privacy side, right?

Matt Odell:

Like I want people to be able to download a mobile wallet, get their first Bitcoin and not have to be the most technical person in the world and still do relatively good privacy best practices. Right. And I think you see that in some projects that might not advertise themselves as privacy projects, and they’re not really focused on it yet, but with a little bit of a little bit of focus on that aspect and trying to just iron out the privacy aspects of it a little bit, you can end up in a situation where you have good UX and relatively good privacy. And the project that I’m specifically thinking of in this case is something like a Muun wallet, which is not meant to be a privacy wallet at all. Right now requires Google services.

Matt Odell:

If you use Calyx, you can use it with micro G, but like it requires Google services, like no privacy wallet should have Google services incorporated in it, but the UX is dead simple, and it bridges Lightning and on chain. Right? So all these different things, I mean, we have a very open-ended mission. I think the cool part about open source projects is that you just have a lot of heads going in a lot of different directions all the time — state chains. It would be really cool to see a state chain implementation would really be really cool to see a coin join implementation on liquid. Maybe tools that allow you to consolidate UTXOs that are under — that a bunch of UTXOs and consolidate them in some kind of privacy focused way that doesn’t completely destroy your privacy and is easy UX.

Matt Odell:

So I think the cool part about this board is this board lives and breathes this stuff already, right? And we’re looking at all of these different projects and watching them develop. And a lot of times, we’re friendly with the developers and the contributors and we see where their head’s at and we see where that’s going. And I think we’ll have very good communication between the projects and us and the donees. And as a result, we’ll be able to, you know, it just keeps coming back to aligning incentives. I think we’ll be able to kind of work off of each other. And maybe it’s not just a money thing. Maybe it’s also a like a feedback kind of loop where people are going back and forth and seeing like what is needed, what is wanted.

Ben Price:

Yeah. And Matt touched on some important things there that I think kind of help answer your question, Stephan without directly supporting any sort of privacy initiatives. There are so many contributors that are contributing in fashions that like in an ancillary way, still push forward privacy tech. So maybe you’re a taproot developer, maybe you’re a code reviewer. Maybe you’re a security researcher, perhaps you’re a UX designer. On any of these projects, that’s one thing that we have left out up until this point that kind of falls under opensats’ purview which is we have a broad definition of who is a contributor. I mean, my background is product management. I am not a tech guy by trade. I’m not getting deep in the weeds. I’m not the guy who’s, who’s auditing code. When you say don’t trust, verify, I’m trusting other people, unfortunately.

Ben Price:

But what I do in a day-to-day fashion is typically how can I get my mom to use a Bitcoin wallet in a privacy focused way that doesn’t sell all of her UTXO data to a third party or so… I guess the main point that I’m trying to stress here is it’s not just core developers that we’re funding. It is designers. It is reviewers. It is researchers it’s really anyone who’s contributing to free and open source software and giving their time to improve it in any way, shape or form. And I think that like every single project benefits from a great designer working on Bitcoin or a great code reviewer reviewing code, or a great security researcher at the protocol level, every product, whether you’re a second, third, 25th layer you get ancillary benefits from that.

Ben Price:

And I think that’s a niche we wanted to fill as well, which is we see organizations like Brink, they’re kind of more focused on developers. Square, I think has a, has a little bit more of a design focus. HRF is a little more focused on privacy. We just want to make sure if you’re a contributor you’re represented you know, you might not make a million dollars a month through our platform, but you will have an avenue to get funding. And if you prove yourself, if you show people that you’re doing good work, then our hope is that the community will see that it will at least try and make it easier with our platform. And if you’re really underfunded, because you’re just super unpopular, I guess, for some reason, or like, you’re name isn’t out there you’re doing unsexy work, quote, unquote, like code reviewers, maybe you know, ideally the board will kind of notice that and we can step in and help fund the projects that really are doing work that we perceive to be extremely helpful, but underfunded.

Stephan Livera:

So how about from a, now we touched on this earlier, but non Bitcoin projects, obviously not shitcoin, but we’re talking about things that enable our sovereignty. Do you want to elaborate a little bit and maybe this is not necessarily opensats perspective, but your personal perspectives as board members, what kinds of things would you be looking for there from a non Bitcoin perspective?

Matt Odell:

I mean, my opinion is I thought it was relatively straightforward, but the idea is stuff like encryption secure hardware. So like, there’s this guy, bunnie studios, like he’s working on open hardware platform that would allow us to like, kind of have the advantages of something like a hardware wallet with a secure element, but it’d be open. And that’s not a Bitcoin only thing, right?

Matt Odell:

That’s not even Bitcoin focused at all. A Tor replacement. Tor I think is a great project and it’s something we rely on heavily. It’d be nice if we had some alternatives to it. Secure messaging, people don’t realize if I need to send you a Bitcoin address, how am I sending you the Bitcoin address that I’m going to send you a Lightning invoice? How am I sending you a Lightning invoice? So I think all of those are pretty obvious I think, but it could go broader than that too. Right? I think, you know distributed social media then maybe the next mastodon or something that has better trust aspects to it. You know, we have fiatjaf who’s a Bitcoin developer working on something called nostr. I probably pronounced it incorrectly, but the idea is like a kind of distributed Twitter that was more censorship resistant.

Matt Odell:

I think for the projects that are listed, like in our so-called marketplace idea where you can earmark, we’re going to be more loose about it as long as they’re not scams and they are generally in the good direction, we’ll list them. And if you want to donate to them, there’ll be a very good, transparent description of what you’re donating to. Then so be it you’re a Bitcoiner or you should, you should be able to earmark where you want it, your mark on the general fund, there are gonna be very spirited discussions about these things. And it’s gonna, it’s going to be way more critical. I think pure Bitcoin projects are obviously gonna have the upper hand in those kinds of allocation discussions just naturally because we’re all Bitcoiners. And I think that as a board member myself, I think there’s going to have to be like a pretty good justification of why we’re donating, why we’re giving — especially if it’s a larger grant, why are we giving a larger grant out of the general fund to maybe a tertiary project.

Matt Odell:

You know, we’re going to have to explain ourselves. And I think ultimately the biggest check here is that we should be as transparent as possible. And that way if we do act in bad faith, the community can just shut us down and just stop donating. And I so I think ultimately the single most important thing we can do here is be as transparent as possible.

Ben Price:

Yeah, Matt listed a ton of things there, and honestly, he’s way more plugged into the privacy and kind of open source community than I am. And you know, another thing that comes to mind is like that I really love personally is like revision control journalism. I think we started to see even like central banks, redacting like comments and adding things then after speeches. It’s just getting ridiculous out here. And so anything that’s free and open source and supports the world. I think, one other thing we’re going to focus on is people that kind of give back learning like education materials to the community. It takes a lot of time and effort and work like. They put in proof of work to put up all these FAQ’s and tutorials. Like these are things that benefit the community as well. And while they might not be deep in the weeds coding, honestly, deep-in-the-weed coders, don’t help me that much. Like what helps me is someone who comes in and shows me how to set up a node or like shows me how to work on layer two, because you know, most people aren’t going to be contributors to Bitcoin core at the end of the day. They’re trying to do their part.

Ben Price:

They’re trying to be privacy oriented and focused. They might be trying to flash their phone and get off kind of Google operating system, but that stuff’s hard. And so I think each and every board member brings a kind of unique perspective into the different kind of ancillary Bitcoin technologies that they want to see supported. And the best thing is like we have nine board members, like none of us are going to capture — we’re not going to capture the full market of products out there. So the best thing you can do is if you are working on something that’s awesome. And again, it has to be free and open source. But if you’re working on that and you think it kind of fits into the mission, come like a fly. And I think you’ll be surprised that as long as you’re helping the world, as long as your software or whatever you’re providing is free and open source you’ll be` welcomed with support.

Stephan Livera:

Awesome. Well, yeah, look, that sounds great. I’m encouraging listeners to sign up as a contributor. And I think the key one here is as you guys were saying earlier, is to have people who are regularly contributing and kicking in some sats every month, or some fiat every month. And that’s the way this thing can build up. So for listeners who want to find you guys online, where can they sign up and become a contributor?

Ben Price:

Right now, our kind of pre-launch website is live. It’s opensats.org. If you screw up and do opensats.com, anything like that, it’ll all get redirected. I snagged all the domains. So opensats.org is where we are right now, right now the website is live for contributors to free and open source software. Well, it’s open for anyone to come check us out. It is kind of a simple landing page, but we’re really pushing for anyone working on projects, any contributors to come and fill out kind of an application to pre listed.

Ben Price:

And in the background again, castle nine is working double time to actually get our donation platform live. So ideally our goal is to have something live before Bitcoin 21. We may or may not hit that deadline, but very, very soon our platform with projects listed where you can donate with your debit or credit cards or via BTCPay server with Bitcoin or lightning that’ll all be live very soon. And yeah, it’s still going to be opensats.org, but again, we’re welcoming contributors right now to list their projects, to be pre listed and kind of vetted. And donors can kind of come there and check out the board, check out the early sponsors. And if you have any interest in giving back, whether you’re a designer, a developer, if you’re a lawyer, if and you know, any way you want to give back some people have reached out and just want to give some Bitcoin. Right now there’s no, no way to directly donate yet, just because we’re still working on automating all the backend accounting things.

Ben Price:

But if you reach out directly at donate@opensats.org or contact@opensats.org, or, my email is ben@opensats.org, feel free to hit me up and you know, we’ll make something work.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. All right, well I’ll put those links in the show notes. So listeners can either contribute fiat or if they are a person contributing on an actual project or they’re coding or doing some other contribution, they can reach out there if they want to get to be supported. I plan to sign up as well as a pleb supporting. So yeah, I like the idea and wish you guys all the best with it. And thanks for joining me on the show today.

Ben Price:

Hey, we appreciate it.

Matt Odell:

Thanks, Stephan. Appreciate you.

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