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.

Apply for the Fellowship

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

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

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

Larry Ruane

Larry reviews and tests Bitcoin Core PRs focusing on correctness, thread-safety, code organization and maintainability, test coverage, logging for problem analysis, and related areas.

@larryruane

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.

@theStack

0xB10C

0xB10C's funding supports his current and upcoming 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.

@0xB10C

Vincenzo Palazzo

Vincenzo's funding supports his work adding new features to Core Lightning and reviewing others' pull requests, as well as his ongoing contributions to the Lightning specification.

@palazzovincenzo

Niklas Gögge

Niklas’ funding supports his work on Bitcoin Core, including an implementation of Utreexo. Utreexo aims to reduce the hardware requirements of running a Bitcoin full node by introducing a hash based accumulator for the UTXO set.

@dergoegge

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.

@fanquake

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 enables him to continue his work on Utreexo, as well as mentorship with junior Bitcoin developers.

@tdryja

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.

@stphnvlstk

Previous Brink Grantees

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.

@jesseposner

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.

@lightlike1

Bruno Garcia

Bruno's funding supported his review and testing Bitcoin Core PRs, extending and improving test coverage, and P2P/wallet work.

@brrrunog

Stay updated

Follow @bitcoinbrink on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter including updates on project progress and accouncements of new fellows and grantees.