The penultimate episode of the Bitcoin web series dedicated to startups is now online. For the first time, non-profit projects take center stage: three initiatives competing to defend privacy, human rights, and the integrity of public documents through decentralized technologies and Bitcoin.
After three episodes dedicated to for-profit startups, which we covered in recent weeks, Cypher Tank opens the doors of PoW.space in Lugano to the non-profit sector. The fourth episode of the web series, filmed in Lugano last October during Plan ₿ Week, has been published on Rumble and for the first time shines a spotlight on projects using Bitcoin and decentralized technologies to defend fundamental rights, guarantee privacy, and protect the integrity of information.
This episode, hosted by Joe Nakamoto — a journalist specializing in the study of the impact of the most well-known digital currency on emerging economies and one of the main moderators of the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano — once again features contestants presenting their initiatives before an exceptional jury, competing for non-dilutive grants of $40,000, $60,000, and $100,000, strictly to be used while being based on the shores of Lake Ceresio.
Outstanding Judges Evaluating High-Impact Social Projects
The evaluation of the three non-profit projects was conducted by a jury composed of five leading figures from the international Bitcoin ecosystem. Leading the so-called “Honeybadger judges” was Adam Back, a legend of the cypherpunk movement and creator of Hashcash — the proof-of-work system cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin’s original white paper. Back is also CEO of Blockstream and creator of Liquid, Bitcoin’s sidechain integrating confidential transactions to ensure greater privacy.
Joining him in this fourth (unmissable) episode were Jorge Jraissati, president of the Economic Inclusion Group — an organization focused on combating de-banking and the weaponization of banking data, meaning the use of financial data as a weapon to exclude, target, or repress individuals and organizations — with particular attention to victims of authoritarian regimes. This is a topic Jraissati knows personally, as he originates from Venezuela.
Also serving on the jury were Iceland’s Sunna Ævarsdóttir — former Pirate Party MP from 2016 to 2024 — global director of the Courage Foundation and privacy and anti-corruption activist; Matt Odell, co-founder of OpenSats — an organization that has already distributed more than 370 grants since 2023; and Jonathan Bier, board member of Brink, a foundation that funds and trains Bitcoin developers.
Three Projects for Fundamental Battles
The first competing project (BTC Coalition & FreedomTech Embassy Network) was presented by Lyudmyla Kozlovska, founder of the Open Dialogue Foundation and leader of the BTC Coalition. Kozlovska has been active in human rights defense for over sixteen years, and her presentation was also an opportunity to share with the judges (and the web series audience) her fight against what she defines as “transnational financial repression”: the weaponization of financial, travel, and communication data by authoritarian regimes to target activists, developers, and human rights defenders even beyond national borders.
Her project focuses on two strategies: targeted advocacy in the United States, Switzerland, and the European Union — jurisdictions that set global standards — and the expansion of the FreedomTech Embassy Network, a network of activists knocking on politicians’ doors to explain why payment privacy is not a crime but an essential tool for defending human rights.
Kozlovska cited her own case as a concrete example: in 2021 and 2022, Kazakh secret agents reportedly attempted to obtain her travel, communication (emails, messages, calls), and financial data through the Belgian judicial system, demonstrating — as she stressed during her speech — how and to what extent international cooperation tools can be abused for repressive purposes.
The next startup presented was founded by Dan Gould and Fabian Jahr, who introduced PISA: a project combining PayJoin and CISA (Cross-Input Signature Aggregation) to improve privacy on Bitcoin. PayJoin is a protocol that allows two people to combine their transactions, breaking the fundamental assumption underlying on-chain surveillance: that all inputs of a transaction belong to the same person. Currently, thanks to partnerships with wallets such as Bull Bitcoin and Cake, there are — according to the presenters — already over one thousand PayJoin transactions per day. CISA, on the other hand, allows multiple signatures to be aggregated into one, drastically reducing costs.
The core idea behind PISA is to make private transactions safer and also cheaper than standard ones — thus creating a concrete incentive for mass adoption. As Gould explained during the presentation, if the current version of PayJoin improves privacy like HTTPS improved web security, the multi-party version with CISA will take it to a qualitatively higher level: transactions will become indistinguishable from one another, making tracking movements almost impossible. The project, already funded by OpenSats, received explicit approval from Adam Back, who emphasized that the idea aligns with the cypherpunk principle of building code, not rules.
The final pitch in this fourth episode was delivered by Rafael Cordon and the well-known Peter Todd, already a speaker at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, for the project “Immutable History Chapter 2: Lugano.” Based on OpenTimestamps — the Bitcoin timestamping protocol created by Todd in 2016 — and SimpleProof, the startup founded by Cordon and managed by Carlos Toriello, the project proposes using the Bitcoin blockchain to protect the integrity of public documents.
The presentation also referenced the example of Guatemala and electoral tally sheets to illustrate how, particularly in the AI era, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic documents from manipulated ones. In this context, anchoring a document to the Bitcoin blockchain certifies that a given file existed in exactly that form at a specific historical moment, making any subsequent alteration evident.
Verdicts and Prize Pool
At the end of the presentations, Giacomo Zucco, representing Plan ₿ Network, took the stage to announce the final verdicts. The three pre-selected projects competed for prizes of $40,000, $60,000, and $100,000, all in the form of non-dilutive grants conditional upon participation in a residency program in Lugano.
Curious to find out who won and which projects secured the largest funding? You can learn more by watching the full episode, available free on Rumble and premiered physically on Monday, February 23 at the Patio of PoW.space in Lugano.
Source: tio.ch
