Last month, a Bitcoin development project won a Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a $100,000 grant to work on Bitcoin development in Kenya. It's a big milestone for the Bitcoin movement that a major foundation with so much influence and clout in development work is taking an interest in the movement to cryptocurrency.

This phase one grant will go to Daniel Bloch, who will work in Kenya to develop a money platform called Bitsoko, which uses "Blockchain technology for low-cost transactions mediated by bitcoins." Bloch will also create "simplified options for paying household bills and payrolls" and use the project to evaluate the security of the platform.

The Gates Foundation opened itself up to working with Bitcoin when it issued a Grand Challenge Exploration in September of 2014 to "Enable Universal Acceptance of Mobile Money Payments." Daniel Bloch is perhaps just the first of many Bitcoin developers who will be reaching out to Gates and other funders interested in financial inclusion. The bigger picture here is that there's a huge amount of interest right now in finding low-cost ways to enable the world's poor to access the kinds of financial services that people in developed countries take for granted.

A major obstacle to serving the unbanked, who have very little money, is that it's not profitable to do for financial companies. Bitcoin could conceivably be a game changer in this regard. In an interview with CoinDesk, Kosta Peric, deputy director of the Financial Services for the Poor initiative at Gates, said:

The very powerful thing about Bitcoin in general and especially the technologies behind it, is they are essentially leapfrogging all the technology and providing a new system for processing these huge amounts of transactions for very small costs.

There's nothing to match support from the Gates Foundation when it comes to mainstream respectability. But another foundation specifically devoted to Bitcoin development, the Bitgive Foundation, has been working this ground for a while, and is pushing hard to change the way business is done in philanthropy as well as all other sectors of the global economy.

At a recent conference in Chicago called Inside Bitcoin, Connie Gallippi, founder of the BitGive Foundation, presented a video demonstrating the impact of the bitcoin charity’s efforts in Kenya. The presentation was the inauguration of a new phase of BitGive’s philanthropic mission and fundraising called Bitcoin Charity 2.0.