OpenSats is a grant-maker with a literal promise attached: every sat donated to its open source funds goes to grant recipients, with no percentage taken for overheads. Operations are funded separately, and it looks for donor-matching partners to absorb transaction fees.
The legal shell is documented in its own filings rather than described in prose. Open Sats Initiative, Inc. is a Texas non-profit corporation, EIN 85-2722249, recognised as a 501(c)(3) public charity, and its amended and restated bylaws are published as a PDF. Its stated purposes run wider than Bitcoin: supporting free and open-source contributors, funding technology that resists censorship and surveillance, and acting as a fiscal sponsor. Decisions are made by a nine-person board, named on the about page, which OpenSats says exists so that no one person or small group controls the decision-making. Its members are not compensated and do not benefit from donations, and no profiles are written for them here because each seat is unpaid and each holder's primary work is elsewhere. The site publishes quarterly financial statements and board meeting minutes going back to 2023. No founding year is stated anywhere on the site, so that field is omitted rather than estimated.
The published totals do not agree with each other, and it is worth saying so rather than picking one. As of August 2026 the transparency page reported 337 grants given, roughly 33.1 billion sats sent and about 28.8 million United States dollars allocated, while the home page reported 21,646,000 dollars distributed and about 24.6 billion sats to 252 grantees. Country counts differ too: 32 or more on the home page, more than 40 in the FAQ. The figures may be counting different things, and the site does not say. Individual grant amounts are usually not disclosed at all, which OpenSats explains as a grantee safety measure: publishing what someone is paid can endanger them or their family.
The most consequential piece is the Long-Term Support programme, launched in July 2023 for Bitcoin Core contributors and, in its own phrasing, similar load-bearing internet people. It is a multi-year commitment rather than a project grant, and named recipients include Sjors Provoost, Vasil Dimov, Gleb Naumenko, Will Clark, 0xB10C, Jon Atack and Andrew Toth. OpenSats is also a Gold Member of the Bitcoin Dev Kit Foundation.