Vector has just qualified and received a grant from the Human Rights Foundation through its Bitcoin Development Fund. We are one of sixteen projects in Round II of 2026, a round totaling more than 500 million satoshis across Bitcoin development, payments, mining, education, and Nostr.
Privacy by Principle:
Bitcoin Development Fund, Round II 2026 by HRF
Overview#
Vector has just qualified and received a grant from the Human Rights Foundation
HRF listed us under the heading Privacy by Principle, one that truly encompasses Vector in three words both from a technical and philosophical perspective. Their write-up doesn't start about encryption, but with what Vector refuses to ask for: no KYC, no metadata trail, no permission to speak. This has been the core focus since the very first commit. Permissionless privacy should be accessible to everyone, ensuring privacy remains a basic human right.
Vector's entry in HRF's announcement, listed under Nostr.
What the Grant Funds#
- Desktop & iOS: widescreen desktop client that enables true day-to-day communication for individuals, teams, organizations, and communities. Plus, Vector's first release on iOS.
- Encrypted Voice & Video Calls: real-time communication with the same guarantees as the rest of the app, built on Concord Protocol.
- People Who Need It Most: journalists, activists, and whistleblowers who need to coordinate without being tracked or silenced.
What This Changes, and What It Doesn't#
It changes the pace and grants further stability. Work that was going to take a year of evenings now has runway behind it, and the roadmap we have been publishing at the end of every release post becomes a schedule rather than a hope.
It changes nothing else. Vector is free and open source and will stay that way. There is no investor at the table, no equity sold, and no obligation attached to this grant beyond building what we already said we were building. The code remains public, the protocol remains an open specification anyone can implement, and the app remains something you can compile yourself and verify line by line.
A grant does not make software trustworthy or legitimate. Being verifiable does.
About the Fund#
The Bitcoin Development Fund backs projects that make Bitcoin and adjacent freedom technologies more useful to people living under authoritarian rule. Since launching in 2020 it has granted 12.2 million dollars in BTC to 383 projects across 70 countries.
The same round funds offline Lightning payments in Jamaica, mobile money bridges across five African countries, open-source Bitcoin mining hardware, wallet reproducibility auditing, and developer training for women in Lagos, Nairobi, and Sao Paulo.
Vector sits in the Nostr category alongside three others: Flotilla Chat, a Discord-style community platform from the team behind Coracle; OpenAlert, decentralized emergency alerts with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages; and 0xchat, an encrypted messenger with Tor and a built-in Cashu wallet. We would rather share the category than own it: a single encrypted messenger is a product, and several interoperating on an open protocol is infrastructure.
Read HRF's full announcement: HRF Grants 500M+ Satoshis to 16 Freedom Tech Projects Worldwide
Thank You#
We wanted to give a special thank you to the Human Rights Foundation for supporting and helping to fund an idea born out of necessity, and to every Community member who tested a preview build, filed a bug report, or argued with us about a design decision. Vector got here on unpaid attention from people who cared.
The mission remains the same... Privacy is a basic human right.
Join the Vector Community#
This grant helps fund the work, but it does not decide what gets built. That has always come from the people using Vector every day and telling us where it falls short and features they would like to see implemented. There is a seat in that conversation for you. Take part of Freedom Tech and join Vector Privacy in Open Beta!
Download Vector from the Website or GitHub, and join the Vector Community!
Vector Privacy is a free, open-source, decentralized communication platform built on Nostr.
No KYC. No metadata. No ads. No compromise.
V E C T O R
◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢ ⚠️ Privacy is a basic human right. ◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢ • Private & Encrypted Messenger App • Open-Source & Free-to-Use • Built on Nostr ◤◢ Privacy by Principle ◤◢ Vector is a decentralized communication platform built on the Nostr Protocol, offering no-compromise encryption with zero metadata leakage and plausible deniability for all content, including texts, media, voice notes, and files, adhering to the NIP-17 standard. It natively integrates BIP-39, allowing every Vector account to function as a crypto wallet and vice versa, streamlining tasks like address sharing and payments through compatibility with native wallets like MPW. Vector leverages local, private, device-powered AI to provide practical features such as voice message transcription, language translation, and meme gif search via a decentralized relay-based index. Its resilience is ensured by community-run Nostr relays, eliminating downtime, and its fully open-source codebase—from infrastructure to protocol specs—avoids proprietary lock-in, making it unkillable and transparent. Open-source technology developed by Formless Labs.
◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢ ⚠️ Privacy is a basic human right. ◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢ • Private & Encrypted Messenger App • Open-Source & Free-to-Use • Built on Nostr ◤◢ Privacy by Principle ◤◢ Vector is a decentralized communication platform built on the Nostr Protocol, offering no-compromise encryption with zero metadata leakage and plausible deniability for all content, including texts, media, voice notes, and files, adhering to the NIP-17 standard. It natively integrates BIP-39, allowing every Vector account to function as a crypto wallet and vice versa, streamlining tasks like address sharing and payments through compatibility with native wallets like MPW. Vector leverages local, private, device-powered AI to provide practical features such as voice message transcription, language translation, and meme gif search via a decentralized relay-based index. Its resilience is ensured by community-run Nostr relays, eliminating downtime, and its fully open-source codebase—from infrastructure to protocol specs—avoids proprietary lock-in, making it unkillable and transparent. Open-source technology developed by Formless Labs.