OpenSats manages grants for developers, researchers and educators.
Tether has an alterego that drives the decentralization of the Bitcoin protocol.
Tether, the issuing company of USDT, announced a donation of $250,000 to OpenSats, a non-profit organization dedicated to funding open source projects in Bitcoin and freedom technologies, with the aim of supporting the development of its decentralized ecosystem.
The contribution It was announced this October 16 and seeks to promote OpenSats protocol, privacy and education initiativesfounded as a 501(c)(3) entity in the United States, manages grants to distribute entirely to developers, researchers and educators working on free, censorship-resistant software.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, explained the purpose in a statement:
We believe that Bitcoin and the free software that powers it are indispensable for a more decentralized future. OpenSats is on the front lines of funding the next generation of innovators, and we’re proud to support their work.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.
In turn, Matt Odell, co-founder of OpenSats, added that the support will help continue its mission to expand the use and development of free software.
This initiative is aligned with Tether’s previous efforts to strengthen the Bitcoin network, despite its centralized structure as the issuer of the USDT stablecoin.
In recent months, the company has invested in decentralized mining through the OCEAN pool and enabled the issuance of its stablecoin on the Lightning Network for more efficient transactions.
Ardoino has publicly defended these actions as a means to expand the autonomy and resistance to censorship of bitcoin, a crypto asset that the company has in its reserves.
However, the centralization of the company has generated criticism in the community: Tether manages a public network that allows funds to be frozen on-chain under court orders, which clashes with the principles of immutability of Bitcoin.
Despite this, its technical contributions – such as the deployment of hash rate in pools with decentralized mining templates – seek to counteract these perceptions and contribute to the robustness of the protocol.
The announcement does not detail specific projects that will receive funding from this grant, but OpenSats is prioritizing high-impact areas such as privacy tools and protocol development.