Brink exists to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol and network through fundamental research and development, and to support the Bitcoin developer community through funding, education, and mentoring.
We support and mentor new contributors to open source Bitcoin development through our fellowship program, and support the work of established Bitcoin protocol engineers through our grants program.
We were founded in 2020 with generous financial support from John Pfeffer and Wences Casares. We are 100% funded by donations from individuals and organizations who wish to support the open source Bitcoin network and protocol.
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Team
Mike Schmidt
CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Mike joined the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2018 as a product manager at Blockstream and a contributor to Bitcoin Optech. With Optech, he contributes to the newsletters in addition to organizing and presenting technical content at member workshops. Mike has also contributed to Bitcoin Core by organizing events, assisting in running the taproot review sessions, and performing testing and outreach in the space.
Emily Kee
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Emily Kee brings with her 10+ years of combined experience in operations, project management, and marketing. Emily’s foundation in Bitcoin Operations began when she contributed her organizational efforts to projects for Chaincode Labs and Qala. She is committed to supporting the Bitcoin developer community as Brink’s Director of Operations as well being the onsite Office Manager for Brink’s office in London.
Board
Mike serves on the board, along with the following independent board members:
Jonathan Bier
Jonathan serves on Brink's board and brings experience administering the BitMEX Open Source Developer Grant Program. He has authored two books: The Blocksize War and Reckless: The Story Of Cryptocurrency Interest Rates. He has also written a series of research articles for BitMEX.
Alex Leishman
Alex Leishman serves on Brink's board. He is the CEO of River Financial and brings years of experience building engineering teams and leading a Bitcoin organization.
Grant Committee
Mike serves on the grant committee, along with leading Bitcoin technologists:
Cory Fields
Cory is a long-time Bitcoin Core developer with over 11 years of experience contributing hundreds of commits and nearly 4,000 review comments to the project. He is focused on the build system, continuous integration, code security, modularization, and long-term code maintainability.
Niklas Gögge
In addition to his work on Bitcoin security including finding, fixing, and responsibly disclosing bugs and his efforts building out Bitcoin Core's testing infrastructure, Niklas serves on Brink's grant committee.