Brink, a nonprofit designed to offer financial support and mentorship to Bitcoin developers, has announced the recipients of its first round of open-source developer grants. It will be supporting Jesse Posner’s work on adaptor signatures and the FROST threshold signature scheme, Alekos Filini’s work on the Bitcoin Developer Kit and Hennadii Stepanov’s work on Bitcoin Core development and review.
“After an open grant application process, the Brink board of directors has selected three developers who have demonstrated continued commitment to open-source Bitcoin protocol development,” according to a release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “Their work spans fundamental cryptographic engineering, application tooling and base layer development and maintenance.”
Adaptor signatures and FROST are meant to bring additional security, privacy and functionality to multisignature and second-layer protocols on Bitcoin. Posner’s grant was made possible by digital asset financial services company Nexo.
The Bitcoin Developer Kit is meant to provide modular and easy-to-leverage tools for Bitcoin wallets and other applications and the funding will support Filini’s role as its maintainer.
Over three years of work, Stepanov has become one of the most active contributors to Bitcoin Core and the funding will allow him to focus on the project full time.
Brink was launched last year by developers John Newbery and Mike Schmidt. Its first fellowship was awarded to Gloria Zhao in December 2020 to support her work on package relay for Bitcoin mempools.