Fellowship
The Brink fellowship is an intensive one-year program to onboard exceptional software engineers into Bitcoin protocol development.
As a Brink fellow, you’ll spend a year working alongside our engineering team and the other Brink fellows. You’ll learn about all aspects of the Bitcoin Core system, including consensus, peer-to-peer networking, wallets and cryptography. You’ll become an effective open source contributor, and will start making contributions to the project from day one. By the end of your fellowship, you’ll have a track record of high-quality, high-impact contributions to Bitcoin Core or other open source projects, and you’ll be very well positioned to seek funding or employment to continue your open source Bitcoin career.
If you love Bitcoin and can’t imagine wanting to work on any other project, then there’s no better place to start your Bitcoin career. You’ll receive dedicated mentoring and support, be surrounded by passionate Bitcoiners, and learn by doing - making contributions to Bitcoin Core and other projects.
We’re looking for developers from all backgrounds to apply. You need to be passionate about Bitcoin and hungry to make contributions to the project. There are no specific educational requirements - evidence of prior open source contributions (code review, technical writing, etc) is far more important.
Fellows will be paid a competitive salary, with all of the benefits you’d expect for a software engineering job. The fellowship takes place in our London office, so applicants must be prepared to relocate. We may be able to help with travel and visas on a case-by-case basis.
Brink Fellows
Marco De Leon
Marco De Leon is a Brink fellow mentored by Niklas Gögge. His focus is on Bitcoin Core fuzz testing, with the goal of expanding test coverage, adding useful oracles, and identifying vulnerabilities.
Grants
Bitcoin’s long-term success requires a sustainable funding model for open source developers to maintain and extend the protocol, test and review code changes, and fix critical bugs in the software. Brink was founded to support Bitcoin development and Bitcoin open source developers. Our grant program is central to that mission.
The grant program awards year-long grants to established Bitcoin protocol developers to work full time on open source Bitcoin projects. Our primary focus is on the security and stability of the base protocol, but we will also fund research and development on extending functionality, scalability and usability of Bitcoin and related projects, including Lightning and other layer two technologies.
The grant program is open to developers anywhere in the world. Grant applicants must:
- have a track record of making high-quality, security-first contributions to Bitcoin or related projects.
- be committed to transparency and accountability. Brink is a publicly funded organization, and grantees are expected to publicly commit to project deliverables and give regular public updates on progress.
- be self-motivated and self-driven. Grantees will provide regular public updates on their projects, but day-to-day will be working independently. To be successful, grantees must thrive in a no-management work environment.
- be able to work collaboratively and constructively with other open-source contributors.
- be committed to increasing the impact of their contributions, growing the developer ecosystem and scaling Bitcoin and related projects.
Brink Grantees
Michael Ford (fanquake)
Michael's funding supports his work as a maintainer as well as his work on the build system, security, and reducing the number of dependencies used in the codebase.
Hennadii Stepanov
Hennadii has been contributing code and review to Bitcoin Core since 2018. In that time he has become one of the most prolific contributors to the project. Hennadii’s funding allows him to work full time on Bitcoin Core development and review.
Sebastian Falbesoner
Sebastian's funding supports his code review and testing, improving test coverage, extending the test framework, and improving the networking/P2P and wallet codebases.
Niklas Gögge
Niklas’ funding supports his work on Bitcoin Core. His focus is on making Bitcoin Core's peer-to-peer code more robust through review, testing and fuzzing.
Stéphan Vuylsteke
Stéphan's grant enables him to continue his review and testing of changes to Bitcoin Core, contribute to Miniscript, and his educational efforts of new Bitcoin developers.
Fabian Jahr
Fabian's grant supports his work on investigating innovations enabled by Schnorr signatures, dedicated in-depth code review of important Bitcoin Core initiatives, ASMap development, and alternative code hosting solutions.
Eugene Siegel
Eugene's grant supports his security engineering work including fuzz testing, code review, and building out fuzzing infrastructure, with a focus on the P2P networking code.
Brink Alumni
Jesse Posner
Jesse’s funding supported his work on adaptor signatures and an implementation of the FROST threshold signature scheme. These technologies bring additional security, privacy and functionality to multisignature and second layer protocols.
Martin Zumsande
Martin has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since early 2019. His grant focus was on Bitcoin Core's peer-to-peer and address relay code.
Bruno Garcia
Bruno's funding supported his review and testing Bitcoin Core PRs, extending and improving test coverage, and P2P/wallet work.
0xB10C
0xB10C's funding supported his Bitcoin network monitoring efforts, his work on Bitcoin Core development and review, his educational efforts maintaining bitcoin-dev.blog and his work on reorgs on Signet.
John Newbery
CO-FOUNDER
John has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2016. He co-founded Bitcoin Optech in 2018 to help Bitcoin companies adopt scaling technologies. He helped organize the bitdevs NYC meetups, the Chaincode Residency programs and the weekly Bitcoin Core PR review club. John co-founded Brink in 2020 to support Bitcoin protocol development and onboard future Bitcoin protocol developers and served on the board and as Executive Director.
Carla Kirk-Cohen
BOARD MEMBER, GRANT COMMITTEE
Carla is a software engineer at Chaincode Labs. She was onboarded to full time work on Lightning at the Chaincode 2019 residency, and has served on the Brink board with the goal of helping other developers find their way to Bitcoin.
Antonie Hodge
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Antonie Hodge has worked at the intersection of cryptocurrencies and nonprofits for over six years and brought a wealth of operational experience to the Brink executive team. She is the Operations Director at Coin Center, the leading nonprofit focused on the policy issues facing cryptocurrencies. Antonie previously led our operations, finance, logistics and administration efforts.
Jerry Brito
BOARD MEMBER
Jerry is executive director of Coin Center, the leading non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies. He has testified several times before the U.S. Congress about cryptocurrencies, holds briefings for policy makers, and has presented to the CFTC, SEC, Treasury Department, State Department, the White House and elsewhere. His scholarly research has been published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and the Stanford Technology Law Review, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere.
Tadge Dryja
Tadge is co-author of the Lightning Network whitepaper, developed Discreet Log Contracts on Bitcoin, and works with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. His grant enabled him to continue his work on Utreexo and mentorship with junior Bitcoin developers.
Alekos Filini
Alekos’ funding supported his work as maintainer of the Bitcoin Dev Kit. BDK is a lightweight and modular collection of tools for use by wallets and other Bitcoin applications.
Larry Ruane
Larry's funding supported his work on reviewing and testing Bitcoin Core PRs focusing on correctness, thread-safety, code organization and maintainability, test coverage, logging for problem analysis, and related areas.
Vincenzo Palazzo
Vincenzo's funding supported his work adding new features to Core Lightning and reviewing others' pull requests, as well as his ongoing contributions to the Lightning specification.
Christian Decker
Christian served 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 brought with him Bitcoin and Lightning technical expertise and insight to both the board as well as the grant committee.
Gloria Zhao
Gloria is one of the maintainers of Bitcoin Core, primarily focused on mempool and P2P. As a Brink fellow and grantee, she worked on package relay (BIP331) and transaction relay policy changes to make pinning attacks more difficult. She also served on Brink's grant commitee while running the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club aimed at helping newcomers learn about the codebase and PR review process.
Dave Harding
Dave co-wrote the Bitcoin.org developer documentation in 2014 and 2015. He is the author of Mastering Bitcoin 3rd Edition and since 2018 he has been co-writing a weekly newsletter for Bitcoin Optech. He served Brink as a founding member of the board in 2020 and also served on Brink's grant committee.
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