BitMEX: Bitcoin developer awarded $100,000

Yesterday the BitMEX exchange announced that a developer of the bitcoin blockchain, Gleb Naumenko, was awarded $100,000 for his contribution to the development of the blockchain.

The prize was awarded by HDR Global Trading Limited.

The most promising developers, although they can lend a hand in the development of Bitcoin, certainly can not do so on a regular basis as Bitcoin is not a company and therefore the development work is in no way paid.

For this reason, devs may decide to abandon development to devote themselves to something else, which would jeopardize the continuation of the project. 

In order to avoid this scenario, given that it is in the interest of the community for developers to devote themselves to Bitcoin, HDR has given the most deserving a financial contribution.

With this in mind, HDR has created the Open Source Developer Grants, an annual program of economic support for the most promising developments on Bitcoin.

To date, 750 thousand dollars have been distributed for the development of Bitcoin, half a million dollars to MIT DCI (Digital Currency Initiative), 150 thousand dollars to Michael Ford and 100 thousand dollars to Gleb Naumenko.

Anyone can apply to receive money from this fund; applications can be sent until June 30th, after which they will be examined by the end of July and then continue until September. Those who will be selected will have to draw up a report every 6 months on the status of their work.

There are several names of those who have contributed to this fund for example: 

• The Water Project with $2390, 
• Shadowserver Foundation with $400,000, 
• Gates Philanthropy Partners with $500,000, 
• Nuclear Threat Initiative with $1 million, 
• Our World in Data with $700,000, 
• OpenMined Covid-19 Collective with $300,000, 
• Babel with $500 per month since 2017 
• Sinon with $100 a month.

Who’s Naumenko?

Naumenko has been working on Bitcoin since 2017 and his focus is on privacy and layer building for scalability. He is thus involved in Lightning Network and other protocols; he has collaborated with academic researchers and held bitcoin-themed conferences.

One of his successes is definitely the one related to Erlay, a protocol that significantly reduces the bandwidth for transactions, an important requirement when managing a full node bitcoin. 

Naumenko has also helped to make the network more secure and robust by improving peer-to-peer protocols and in the future will focus on both the security and privacy of the protocol.

Over the next 12 months, Naumenko will need to produce 2 reports, one every 6 months, on the status of the work and how it relates to the development of bitcoin.

As mentioned, he will receive $100,000 distributed equally over the 12 months, both in fiat and bitcoin depending on preference, in other words, we are talking about a “salary” of over $8300 per month.

It is worth mentioning that also in the past another exchange, OKCoin, has carried out a similar fund program of 1000 Bitcoin (BTC) for developers of Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV).