Brink just received our first donation from a Bitcoin Donor-Advised Fund. The donation was in BTC and made using a multisig onchain transaction. This donation was made through Unchained's Bitcoin DAF and will be held in our reserves to fund Bitcoin development into the future. 🚀

Brink is excited to announce that Eugene Siegel has joined us as an open source engineer working on fuzz testing and Bitcoin Core development! With a background as a security engineer working on Lightning and already disclosing multiple Bitcoin Core security vulnerabilities, we're excited for Eugene to help ensure the long-term security, resilience & decentralization of Bitcoin. Welcome Eugene!

Welcoming Eugene Siegel

Eugene Siegel has joined Brink as an engineer to work on fuzz testing and Bitcoin Core development.

Today we celebrate Hennadii Stepanov's 4 year anniversary as a Bitcoin Core engineer at Brink 🎉 From a simple fixup because of an old laptop, to one of the most prolific contributors to Bitcoin Core today...

Celebrating Hennadii’s First Brink Epoch

This month, we’re excited to celebrate a significant milestone—Hennadii Stepanov’s (hebasto) four-year anniversary as an open source Bitcoin ...

Whether that is the build system, operating system compatibility, the GUI, or language translations, hebasto’s efforts have been aimed at making Bitcoin secure, accessible, and user-friendly. Hebasto led a project to migrate the build system to a modern, CMake-based one, 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.

Bitcoin Optech

Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #319

This week’s newsletter summarizes a proposal for allowing Stratum v2 pool miners to receive compensation for the transaction fees contained in th...

Since his initial contribution, hebasto has 1800+ (!) commits to his name. But it isn't just his own work...in the last year alone hebasto also provided nearly 1,700 review comments.

GitHub

Contributors to bitcoin/bitcoin

Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to bitcoin/bitcoin development by creating an account on GitHub.

Brink and the Bitcoin community are lucky to have hebasto on our team. Thank you for your open source #Bitcoin contributions, Hennadii 🚀

Moisturized. Unbothered. In his lane. Flourishing.

Consensus Cleanup soft fork BIP draft dropped https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1800

What is coming in Bitcoin Core 29.0? Demand Pool is deploying Cluster Mempool to production soon? What happens with no checkpoints in Bitcoin Core? View quoted note →

Podcast platforms used by Bitcoin Optech listeners. Pretty unusual stats, I'd think

Making the Presidio Bitcoin Pilgrimage this week. Come say hi if you're there on Thursday or for SF Bitdevs!

Simanta Gautam joined Brink engineers to discuss SNARKS, ZK Rollups & BitVM2 in a Bitcoin context: - Verifiable compute w/SNARKS - 2-way pegs, bridges, BitVM, trust minimization - Bitcoin's state machine - Sovereign ZK rollups - Use cases

Simanta Gautam from Alpen Labs on ZK Rollups

Simanta Gautam from Alpen Labs presents on SNARKS, ZK Rollups, and BitVM2.

Brink is happy to announce a $50,000 contribution to our open source Bitcoin development efforts from VanEck! Thank you to VanEck for supporting open source 🧡

Brink is grateful to receive a $50,000 contribution, in BTC, from Bitwise, to support our Bitcoin open source development work. Bitwise donated $150,000 across Brink, HRF, and OpenSats for Bitcoin open source developers. Thank you to @Hong Kim , Hunter Horsley, and the Bitwise team for supporting Bitcoin open source! 🧡

"Open Source Software and Corporate Influence"

Andrew Lilley Brinker

Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker

Exploring how corporations gain power in open source projects, and how to build resilience to corporate capture.

Is it the longest weekly optech newsletter? View quoted note →

"For a sixth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. Below is a summary of the results in a format similar to previous years’ surveys." PRs Opened and Merged by Year Regarding Goals/Priorities for 2025 Areas of frustration/disappointment in 2024 Changes to improve the process/project Check out the the full post:

Adam Jonas

Bitcoin CoreDev reflections 2024-2025

For a sixth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contr...

Thanks @Jonas for putting this together

Brink renews our financial support for all of our 8 Bitcoin Core engineers through 2025! Thank you to Michael Ford (fanquake), Gloria Zhao, Hennadii Stepanov, Sebastian Falbesoner, Niklas Gögge, Stéphan Vuylsteke, Fabian Jahr, and Marco De Leon for your amazing work on Bitcoin and we are proud to support you. 🙏 If you're curious about the work these engineers are doing, we have a detailed annual report in the works. In the meantime check out last year's annual report

Brink’s 2023-2024 Annual Report

A report on our 2023 progress and 2024 outlook

Up for grabs! Bitcoin Optech would like to add a Block Reorg Calculator to our site. If you would like to implement the (corrected) calculations outlined in chapter 11 of the Bitcoin white paper, we are looking for external contributions! Inquire within:

GitHub

Feature suggestion: reorg calculator · Issue #2156 · bitcoinops/bitcoinops.github.io

Greg Maxwell used to host an online calculator based on Nakamoto's code from the original Bitcoin paper that let you plug in what percentage of has...

This week's Bitcoin Core PR review club PR is #31363, "Cluster mempool: introduce TxGraph", authored by Pieter Wuille and hosted by and hosted by Gloria Zhao. Notes and questions are available on the website, including a gentle introduction to cluster mempool and mempool architecture Starting in 15 minutes!

Bitcoin Core PR Review Club

Cluster mempool: introduce TxGraph

Notes

Listen to: - Yuval Kogman’s disclosed coinjoin vulnerabilities - Jeremy Rubin's thoughts on soft fork proposals - the BDK 1.0.0 release with Steve Myers - transitory soft fork discussion

Bitcoin Optech

Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #335 Recap Podcast

Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Yuval Kogman, Jeremy Rubin, and Steve Myers to discuss Newsletter #335.

Please take a moment to provide Optech feedback on how we are doing by filling out a short survey 🙏 View quoted note →

New Optech monthly segment: "A new monthly section summarizing proposals and discussion about changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules." View quoted note →