Maelstrom, the family office of BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, now funds two of four Bitcoin (BTC) developers full time on privacy tools, with grants capped at $400,000 a year.
Key Points:
- Maelstrom's first annual grant report shows two of four funded developers work full time on Bitcoin privacy.
- Payjoin and Silent Payments aim to make transactions harder to trace, and both already run in mainstream wallets.
- Grant stacking is capped at $400,000 a year, paid monthly in Bitcoin under 12-month contracts.
Maelstrom Maps Its Bitcoin Privacy Bet
The split surfaced in Maelstrom's first annual Bitcoin Grant Program report, published Wednesday. Since October 2024 the program has supported five developers, four of whom remain active and draw monthly Bitcoin payments under 12-month contracts. Two of them harden Bitcoin Core, the network's reference software, while the other two work solely on making transactions harder to trace.
Benalleng works full time on Payjoin, a system that lets a sender and receiver each contribute inputs to one transaction, breaking the long-held assumption that every input traces to a single owner. The protocol already runs in Bull Bitcoin and Cake Wallet, the team has shipped code libraries in four languages, and five more wallet integrations are said to be underway.
Macgyver's project, Silent Payments, curbs address reuse by routing each incoming payment to a fresh, unlinkable address. Blindbit, Cake Wallet and Dana Wallet now support sending and receiving, Sparrow Wallet and Nunchuk added sending, and a Coldcard request became the first hardware-device version. A new GPU scanner called Frigate has cut detection from minutes to seconds, though full Bitcoin Core support stays on hold pending a cryptography review.
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Why Sharma Says Bitcoin Needs Privacy
For the wallet builders shipping these features, privacy is becoming the whole point of the exercise. "Bitcoin is open and permissionless but without privacy, it's a surveillance tool," said Vikrant Sharma, founder of Cake Wallet.
Sharma said many people want to spend Bitcoin on the move without exposing their balances or full transaction history.
Tools such as Silent Payments and Payjoin v2, he added, give everyday holders a workable path to private payments. He compared the moment to the privacy gains already seen across Monero (XMR), saying Bitcoin users can now take a comparable step.
Maelstrom noted that even minority adoption of these tools weakens on-chain surveillance for everyone, not just the people who switch them on, because it scrambles the assumptions analysts rely on.
The push builds on earlier moves, including a $100,000 grant to Payjoin developer Ben Allen in May 2025, when Cake Wallet rolled out Payjoin v2 to ordinary users. Hayes, who co-founded BitMEX before launching Maelstrom, has repeatedly cast financial privacy as core to Bitcoin's everyday use. Because the ledger is public, every payment stays visible forever, which is exactly what these tools try to obscure.
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