Become a sponsor to Blockchain Commons, LLC — A “not-for-profit” benefit corporation
Blockchain Commons is proudly a "not-for-profit" social benefit corporation committed to open source & open development. We advocate for the creation of open, interoperable, secure & compassionate digital infrastructure to enable people to control their own digital destiny and to maintain their human dignity online. We do this by encouraging responsible key management and self-sovereign control of digital assets, focused on our four Gordian principles: independence, privacy, resilience, and openness.
We demonstrate these principles through architectures, specifications, reference applications, and documentation. This work is done in conjunction with a group of wallet developers who are helping us to ensure that these new principles for digital-asset management are widely used and interoperable.
Our work is funded entirely by donations and collaborative partnerships with people like you. Every contribution will be spent on building open tools, technologies, and techniques that sustain and advance blockchain and internet security infrastructure and promote an open web.
For our most recent advances, please see our quarterly reports.
Some of our biggest categories of work include:
- Gordian — The Gordian architecture and principles are the linchpin of our work. Reference apps, hardware kits, and internet services demonstrate their usage.
- Crypto Commons — The Gordian principles are enabled by specifications such as Lifehash, SSKR (Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction), and UR (Uniform Resources). The Crypto Commons provides libraries for integrating these specifications into your programs, as well as CLI tools that exercise these libraries and demonstrate their usage.
- Non-partisan Advocacy — We advocate for technology & digital civil rights to ensure secure & compassionate digital infrastructure.
In late 2022/early 2023, some of our biggest projects are:
- Gordian Envelope — a specification for the architecture of a privacy-preserving “smart document” supporting the storage, backup, encryption, authentication, and transmission of data.
- CSR — a system to automate the recovery of seeds and other sensitive digital data.
Reference applications released for Gordian include:
- Gordian Coordinator (iOS) — a multisig Bitcoin coordinator.
- Gordian Seed Tool (iOS) — a crypto-seed vault.
- Gordian Server (macOS) — your own full node.
- Gordian Wallet (iOS) — a mobile wallet meant to link to your Server.
We also are working to educate users and developers alike, with documentation projects such as:
- Crypto-Commons Docs — using SSKR, URs, and more.
- Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line — tutorials on programming with bitcoin-cli, lightning-cli, and RPC.
- #SmartCustody — risk-modeling adversaries for your digital assets.
These are just the beginning! Blockchain Commons is also working on identity wallets, social-recovery techniques, zero-knowledge curve-operation proofs, advanced cryptographic primitives such as Schnorr, MuSig, and scriptless scripts, and in general establishing multi- and cross-blockchain standards.
To financially support further development at Blockchain Commons, please consider becoming a Sponsor here at GitHub. However, you can alternatively support Blockchain Commons and our vision of the open web with Bitcoin via our BTCPay contribution page.
Blockchain Commons was founded by Christopher Allen (GitHub: @ChristopherA & Twitter: @ChristopherA) who acts as Principal Architect & Executive Director. Christopher is also the founder of Rebooting the Web Of Trust a non-profit supporting human rights decentralized identity.
Meet the team
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Christopher Allen ChristopherAPrincipal Architect & Executive Director
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Wolf McNally wolfmcnallyResearch Engineer / iOS
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Shannon Appelcline shannonaTechnical Writer
Featured work
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BlockchainCommons/SmartCustodyBook
Manuscript for Book "#SmartCustody: The Use of Advanced Cryptographic Tools to Improve the Care, Maintenance, Control, and Protection of Digital Assets"
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BlockchainCommons/Gordian
An entire architecture focused on user agency and security.
Shell 110 -
BlockchainCommons/Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Command-Line
A complete course for learning Bitcoin programming and usage from the command
Jupyter Notebook 3,046 -
BlockchainCommons/Research
Blockchain Commons Research papers
Mathematica 112 -
BlockchainCommons/Gordian-Developer-Community
Discussions of Gordian principles, Gordian specifications, Gordian references, and making it all a reality.
Swift 63 -
BlockchainCommons/crypto-commons
Gordian Reference Code & CLI Utilities
$20 a month
SelectPersonal Benefactor.
You value the principles of Blockchain Commons, supporting independence, privacy, resilience, and openness.
As thanks, after three months of support, we can optionally list your individual name and GitHub handle in the “Sponsors” section of our web pages during the term of your sponsorship. You’ll also receive a quarterly email update on our projects.
$100 a month
SelectDeveloper Benefactor.
You're involved in the blockchain or self-sovereign identity industry.
As with the Personal Benefactor, after three months of support, we can optionally list your individual name and GitHub handle in the “Sponsors” section of our web pages during the term of your sponsorship. You’ll also receive a quarterly email update on our projects.
$500 a month
SelectProject Sponsor.
You're enthusiastic about one of our projects.
As thanks, we’ll send you our quarterly update and after three months of support, we will list your name (or company or team), URL, logo, and a one-line description on your chosen project’s repo during the term of your sponsorship. In the case of a documentation project, like SmartCustody or Learning Bitcoin, we'll also list you in the editions of the documents we release during your term.
$1,000 a month
SelectSustaining Sponsor.
You're a professional developer or a company using some of Blockchain Common's specifications or references.
As thanks, we’ll send you our quarterly update and after three months of support, we will list your name (or company or team), URL, logo, and a one-line description as a Sustaining Sponsor on the main Blockchain Commons web site during the term of your sponsorship, as well as on any major documentation projects released during that period.
This patronage costs about 10% of the salary of an in-house developer (and even less for an in-house blockchain engineer).
$5,000 a month
SelectSustaining Research Sponsor.
You're a professional developer or a company encouraging Blockchain Common's future development of interoperable specifications.
As thanks, we’ll send you our quarterly update and list your name as a Sustaining Sponsor. We'll also give you updates on our roadmap as part of regular calls about our strategies and the tools that we're building, and give you options for what research we should be prioritizing. Finally, we'll offer support on the usage of our reference apps and other tools.
This patronage costs about 25% of the salary of an in-house blockchain engineer and gives you supported access to the Blockchain Commons specifications and tools.
$10,000 a month
SelectSustaining Partner.
You're a professional developer or a company who wants to work closely with Blockchain Commons.
As thanks, we’ll send you our quarterly update, list your name as a Sustaining Sponsor, and give you updates on our roadmap as part of regular calls. These calls may be as frequent as weekly at times and can involve coordination with your development team. Finally, we'll support the usage of our tools and prioritize bug fixes and features that you consider critical. You'll be able to influence the general direction of Blockchain Commons' efforts.
This patronage costs about 50% of the salary of an in-house blockchain engineer and gives you close access to the Blockchain Commons team.