Bitcoin Core developer gets a major grant increase

Written by

Written on Apr 1, 2020

Reading time 2 minutes

BitMEX recently decided to increase and prolong its grant to Bitcoin Core developer, Michael Ford.
The original grant, which was at $60,000, is now extended to last until March 2021, and increased to $100,000.
The grant comes with no strings attached, and the firm will not have any influence over the maintainer.

HDR Global Trading, a company that owns and operates derivatives exchange BitMEX, recently published a new announcement. According to the reveal, the company plans to increase the grant that it pays to a Bitcoin Core developer, Michael Ford.

The purpose of the move is to secure that the Bitcoin protocol development will stay up and running. The grant amount went up from $60,000 to $100,000. The announcement also says that the grant will last over a 12-month period, starting in March 2020.

HDR continues to donate for crypto research and development

The company has been supporting Ford and his work ever since he became the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core in June 2019. As one of the five maintainers of the Bitcoin Core, his role is to ensure that the network keeps running. Apart from that, he can also propose certain software changes, and implement them if necessary.

However, HDR Global Trading does not only support Ford. It supported other entities in the past, as well. One example is the MIT DCI (Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative). The company provided an unconditional donation to it only two months before it started supporting Ford. The purpose of the donation was to keep the crypto research going. However, it did not reveal the size of the donation to date.

The grant carries no strings, but it has some conditions

As for Ford himself, he returned the favor by contributing research to BitMEX Research. For example, he provided data about how recent system updates changed the protocol performance. Meanwhile, they also reduced Bitcoin’s potential attack surface.

With the announcement of the new grant, Ford’s old grant — which was approaching its end in July 2020 — got replaced. The move comes for the community’s own benefit. It will increase transparency, and it comes with no strings attached, according to the company.

However, it does come with certain conditions. One of them is that all work produced must be fully open-source, as well as relevant to the development of Bitcoin. If Ford violates any of the conditions while using the funds, HDR will be able to terminate its donation at any time.