Rene Pickhardt and Chris Coverdale have been awarded two new open-source Bitcoin development grants by BitMEX, which marks the ending of the company’s 2021 grant program.
Rene and Chris receive BitMEX’s grant
Rene and Chris have each been awarded a stipend of $33,333 each month until May 2022, which is the equivalent of $50,000 per year. According to the statement, this interim financing is intended to assist prospective developers in transitioning to full-time Bitcoin development.
According to the release, BitMEX CEO Alex Höptner stated that the inclusion of Rene Pickhardt and Chris Coverdale to the open-source Bitcoin developer award program brings the total number of open source developers to six.
Alex said that they are proud of their long-term commitment to Bitcoin and open-source software. He added that they are thrilled to have Rene and Chris join the program, and they will be supporting Bitcoin development for years to come.
Rene’s plan for BitMEX’s grant
Rene will strive to improve the Lightning Network’s payment process’s dependability. In March, he released a paper that introduced probabilistic path-finding and served as the basis for his follow-up work on optimally reliable and inexpensive payment flows, which he submitted in July.
Rene plans to provide his breakthrough path-finding algorithm, dubbed “Pickhardt Payments,” as a library that may be used by Lightning Network nodes, wallets, and service providers.
Rene will continue developing his optimum payment flows algorithm and work on the many follow-up issues raised by his article, thanks to BitMEX’s funding.
Chris’ plan for BitMEX’s grant
On the other hand, Chris will be concentrating on bitcoin mining. The developer will continue to work on the Stratum V2 Bitcoin mining pool technology, which he has been developing since February.
Instead of outsourcing these decisions to the mining pool operator, the protocol enables end miners to choose transactions and contract blocks directly, increasing data transmission efficiency and Bitcoin’s censorship resistance.
Slush Pool/Braiins are also working on a protocol implementation. Nonetheless, BitMEX’s funding aims to support Chris in his self-implementation while also increasing Stratum V2’s success possibilities.
BitMEX also funds Bitcoin Core maintainer Michael Ford, Gleb Naumenko, Bitcoin Core developer Sjors Provoost, and Utreexo developer Calvin Kim in addition to Rene and Chris.
BitMEX said financing has been secured for all six grantees until May 2022, when the firm will evaluate renewals.
