Fellowship

The Brink fellowship is an intensive one-year program to onboard exceptional software engineers into Bitcoin protocol development. Developed and coordinated by Brink director John Newbery, the fellowship draws on John’s four years experience of contributing to Bitcoin Core, running the Chaincode Residencies and PR Review Club, and mentoring many Bitcoin open source contributors.

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.

Apply for the Fellowship

Brink Fellows

Gloria Zhao

Gloria has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since March 2020. Her focus is on Bitcoin Core's peer-to-peer code, and she is currently implementing mempool package acceptance.

@glozow

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.

Apply for a Grant

Brink Grantees

Jesse Posner

Jesse’s funding supports 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.

@jesseposner

Alekos Filini

Alekos’s funding supports 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.

@afilini

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.

@hhebasto

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