Founded in September of 2020, Brink has officially made it through our first Bitcoin 4-year cycle. As we celebrate our 4 year anniversary, we have compiled our first annual report highlighting engineering accomplishments in 2023, engineer’s progress and plans during 2024, and details of Brink’s fundraising and expenses.
We hope this report provides tangible insights into progress made on Bitcoin’s open source codebase, by Brink engineers, that is often hard to assess or quantify.
We provide some highlights from the report below, with the full report available here.
Organizational Updates
Fundraising
Brink’s sponsors donated approximately $2,400,000 toward our mission last year. These contributions came from over 500 different donors.
Brink is thankful for our diverse donor base, which includes high-net-worth individuals, Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin mining pool operators, venture capitalists, Lightning businesses, hardware device manufacturers, family offices, exchanges, and hundreds of individual donors.
In the report, we list all of our major donors, who contributed over $5,000 each, and thank them for the crucial role they played in our success.
Expenses
In 2023, Brink’s expenses were approximately $1,600,000. The summary of these expenses include:
- Program: Developer Funding ($1,220,000)
- Developer Salaries & Grants ($1,100,000)
- Travel ($35,000)
- Office ($85,000)
- Program: General Bitcoin Core Support ($16,000)
- Program: Bitcoin Core Developer Meetings ($41,000)
- Program: Bitcoin Optech ($14,000)
- Operations, Staff, and Fundraising ($309,000)
- Staff Compensation ($200,000)
- Operational expenses ($92,000)
- Fundraising ($17,000)
We breakdown these items in more detail in the report.
Note: For clarity, the figures provided are approximations based on the cash method for 2023. Audited, accrual-based GAAP financials will be available in our public 2023 Form 990 filing.
Engineering Highlights
We focus on the quantity and quality of each engineer’s code review and testing before we look at any other contributions they made. This is a deliberate decision. We frequently hear that many open source contributors worry that they will only receive offers if they pursue headline-grabbing projects, rather than quietly performing the high-quality code reviews and testing that are essential to keeping Bitcoin Core secure and getting useful changes merged quickly. While number of review comments is far from the perfect metric, we noticed how uncommonly large these numbers were, and wished to highlight them as a reflection of Brink engineers’ focus on review and security. As an organization, Brink always puts review and testing first and foremost, and we’ve tried to reflect that part of our internal culture in this external report.
Sebastian Falbesoner
Left over 300 review comments as a part-time engineer, many of them focused on version 2 encrypted peer-to-peer transport. He also began contributing to the libsecp256k1 cryptographic library used by Bitcoin Core and several other security-focused projects.
Michael Ford
Continued his role as project maintainer, leaving almost 1,600 review comments, merging an average of 11 pull requests a week, and releasing every 2023 version of Bitcoin Core. He helped lead several efforts to modernize Bitcoin Core’s build toolchain.
Niklas Gögge
Left over 500 review comments, publicized several responsible disclosures he had made of serious vulnerabilities, found multiple new bugs in Bitcoin Core pull requests before they were merged, significantly extended Bitcoin Core’s testing infrastructure, and made several safety-focused changes to Bitcoin Core’s code.
Fabian Jahr
Left over 200 review comments after joining Brink mid-2023, led major improvements to distributed generation of ASMap files, wrote proof-of-concept code for batch validation of schnorr signatures, researched cross-input signature aggregation, and added significant resiliency to Bitcoin Core’s code hosting.
Hennadii Stepanov
Left almost 1,300 review comments, contributing greatly to the project’s effort to modernize its build tool chain, and continued his role as the project’s GUI maintainer. He also continued working with the Bitcoin Design Community on a reference GUI wallet design compatible with Bitcoin Core.
Stéphan Vuylsteke
Left almost 600 review comments, earning special commendation from his peers for his diligence and follow up. He continued contributing to multiple education and mentorship efforts, including Qala, London BitDevs, and the Bitcoin Core Pull Request Review Club.
Gloria Zhao
Continued her role as mempool/P2P system maintainer, leaving 900 review comments and leading the work on package relay. She was also a leading contributor to TRUC (v3) transactions and ancestor-aware funding. She gave multiple talks at Bitcoin conferences, co-maintains the Bitcoin Core Pull Request Review Club, and helps mentor several new Bitcoin Core contributors.
While those highlights are interesting, the report contains over 17 pages of Bitcoin development updates from Brink engineers that we are proud to showcase for the community.
Outlook
We all want to see a stronger, more resilient Bitcoin network. As outlined in this report, Brink engineers made substantial progress in improving the foundational Bitcoin infrastructure in 2023 and have already made significant progress in 2024 towards that end. We are grateful for all of the Brink-sponsored engineers’ work and thank all of Brink’s sponsors for empowering us to achieve this mission!
Mike Schmidt
Executive Director
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