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.
Subscribe to the Brink newsletter or follow @bitcoinbrink on Twitter to receive updates on what else we are working on.
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
OPERATIONS MANAGER & UK OFFICE MANAGER
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 Operations Manager 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:
Christian Decker
Christian serves on Brink's board as well as grant committee. He works at Blockstream, wrote the world's first dissertation on Bitcoin and focuses on improving the understanding of underlying consensus mechanisms while making Bitcoin scalable and his research has resulted in numerous publications. Christian brings with him Bitcoin and Lightning technical expertise and insight to both the board as well as the grant committee.
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.
Grant Committee
Mike serves on the grant committee, along with leading Bitcoin technologists:
Dave Harding
Dave co-wrote the Bitcoin.org developer documentation in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, he created a section of Bitcoin.org dedicated to the Bitcoin Core project before joining the startup 21.co, where he wrote a series of Bitcoin developer tutorials. Since 2018 he has been co-writing a weekly newsletter for Bitcoin Optech. He joined Brink as a founding member of the board in 2020 and now serves on Brink's grant committee.
Christian Decker
Christian serves on Brink's board as well as grant committee. He works at Blockstream, wrote the world's first dissertation on Bitcoin and focuses on improving the understanding of underlying consensus mechanisms while making Bitcoin scalable and his research has resulted in numerous publications. Christian brings with him Bitcoin and Lightning technical expertise and insight to both the board as well as the grant committee.
Gloria Zhao
Gloria's in-depth experience as a Bitcoin Core developer and maintainer as well as Brink grantee led to her joining Brink's grant committee where she lends her expertise in evaluating grant applications.