This month, we’re excited to celebrate a significant milestone—Hennadii Stepanov’s (hebasto) four-year anniversary as an open source Bitcoin engineer at Brink. Over these years, he has proven himself an invaluable developer, achieving a prolific number of contributions to Bitcoin Core and its GUI repository.
A Simple Bugfix
Hebasto’s journey began when he encountered a bug as an end user of the Bitcoin Core software. He was running Bitcoin Core on an old laptop in pruned mode and noticed a discrepancy between the documentation and the actual behaviour of the software and took the initiative to fix it.
For hebasto, this is the moment when he became a true Bitcoiner. This simple act led him to become an ongoing Bitcoin Core contributor, amassing over 1,800 code commits since that original bug fix.
Prioritizing the End User
Hebasto’s work on Bitcoin Core has always been guided by his focus on the end user’s needs, ensuring the software remains practical, user-friendly, and accessible.
He believes that for any software to truly function, three accessibility elements are necessary:
- Accessible Hardware: Ensuring that people have the means to run the software.
- Skilled Operation: Empowering individuals—no matter their technical background—with the skills needed to operate Bitcoin Core software on the hardware and operating system of their choice.
- Language: End users being able to run the software in their own native language.
Hebasto’s ongoing efforts have been aimed at making Bitcoin secure, accessible, and user-friendly.
Key Milestones & Achievements
- 2018, August: First contribution to Bitcoin Core
- 2020: Introduced anchor P2P connections to mitigate certain types of eclipse attacks
- 2020: Received his first sponsorship from Cardcoins
- 2021, March: Awarded his first grant from Brink in recognition of his work
- 2021, April: Entrusted with the responsibility for overseeing the Bitcoin Core GUI repository as a maintainer
- 2022, March: Joined Brink’s office in London office to collaborate in person
- 2024: Completed the migration of Bitcoin Core’s build system to CMake
Project Leadership
Hebasto’s regular contributions also led to taking a leadership role over several projects:
- GUI Modernization: Initially focused on improving the Bitcoin Core GUI, his interests soon expanded to address multi-threading issues. This led him to co-initiate a project alongside other developers and designers to create a modern, multi-platform GUI.
- Build System Overhaul: Recognizing the limitations of Bitcoin Core’s Autotools-based build system (in use since 2013), hebasto launched a project to migrate the system to a modern, CMake-based build system, enhancing efficiency and paving the way for future development. The migration to CMake took nearly 300 pull requests, a dozen people, and two years of review and testing.
- Translation Improvements: Hebasto drove the move to a modern translation format which allows code developers comments, to translators to better understand the context of translatable text in Bitcoin Core.
Looking Ahead
We are incredibly proud to support hebasto’s work at Brink. As one of the most prolific contributors to Bitcoin Core today, his impact is felt by every user of Bitcoin Core—directly or indirectly.
We look forward to many more years of his steady, thoughtful, and impactful contributions to the open-source Bitcoin ecosystem.
Support Our Team
Brink is a Bitcoin research and development centre, founded in 2020 to support independent open source protocol developers and mentor new contributors.
As we celebrate hebasto’s steady contributions, we also recognize that great work like his—and that of other Bitcoin Core engineers at Brink—relies on ongoing support. We invite supporters to contribute to Brink. Your donation helps sustain the work of dedicated engineers like hebasto, helping ensure long-term security, resilience, and decentralization of Bitcoin.
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