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The Okcoin cryptocurrency exchange continues its round of grants to support the open source development of the Bitcoin protocol.
Announced Thursday, the exchange gave Brink a $ 100,000 grant to keep the nonprofit organization funding Bitcoin developers and researchers.
Brinks’ first round of grants allowed developers to work full-time on projects ranging from second-layer protocol security and privacy to global Bitcoin Core encoding and code review.
Bitcoin, a network that captures $ 685 billion in value, has only around 30 full-time core developers, while more traditional tech companies have thousands.
As bitcoin continues to evolve, such grants are helping more developers ensure the protocol can meet the challenges ahead.
Brink supports new developers through grants as well as developers of more mature ecosystems through grants.
Last week, Okcoin awarded Joo Barbosa, a well-respected code reviewer in the industry, a grant in an undisclosed amount. His work contributes to the overall privacy and security of the protocol.
Barbosa had previously returned a grant given to him by Coinbase, citing personal reasons.
We partnered with Brink because, in addition to sponsoring individual developers with specific roadmaps over the past year, Brink is growing the Bitcoin Core developer ecosystem: mentoring, education, connecting and collaborating with peers, has Okcoin CEO Hong Fang said in an email. Brink allows us to extend the reach of our grants, while working with individual developers whose work we support.
As for Barbosa, Fang said the grant was intended to support the development of Bitcoin Cores’ user experience on mobile.
Barbosa said it made sense to help support mobile devices given that mobile usage has steadily increased compared to desktop computers.
People tend to judge software by how it looks, and the existing GUI is pretty much outdated, he said in the post. With better UX, we can push people to run their own Bitcoin node from their pocket, which is especially relevant for people who can’t access a desktop.
Brink co-founder Mike Schmidt said Brink was grateful for Okcoin’s generous contribution. We recently closed submissions for our latest round of grants and will be reviewing applications and announcing grants soon, he said in an email to CoinDesk. We are excited about this next round of grants and will fund high impact developers similar to our first round of grants.
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