Bitcoin Core Sponsorship Programme

The Bitcoin Core Sponsorship Programme provides a way for the Bitcoin industry to fund independent research and development of Bitcoin Core, by funding developers, developer projects, or otherwise providing resources to the project. The programme is tailored for larger industry participants and at this time, we have no mechanism for taking smaller donations.

To maintain decentralisation, projects will be individually managed by a separate lead, who will be responsible for heading the project as well as allocating funds.

The Bitcoin Core project has a suggested list of projects that require funding, and sponsors are also able to suggest their own. Sponsors may provide funding or human resources.

To discuss the possibilities, please email sponsorship@bitcoincore.org

Additionally please see the FAQ for more details.

Example general projects:

  • Internships for new developers to help with code, review and testing
  • Fund/provide full time developers who can help day to day including with peer review
  • Generic project management stuff - like meeting notes, summaries, chasing people
  • Communications, public relations and marketing (including podcasts and interviews)
  • Documentation
  • Educational materials (videos, multimedia)
  • Website
  • Infrastructure
  • Designers for videos, diagrams, graphics, infographics, animated GIFs, technical illustration

Example technical projects:

  • Improve block relay
  • IBLT
  • Research and on how to do a hard fork safely
  • Flexcap blocksize
  • UTXO commitments
  • Relay network maintenance
  • Relay Network v2
  • Lightning network integration, UI, testing, payment channels, lightning network stuff
  • Build toolchain, deterministic builds, deterministic debian
  • Libsecp256k1 maintenance
  • Schnorr Signatures/ Combined-sig-over-multiple-inputs-via-schnorr-sigs
  • Confidential Transactions
  • Coinjoin, mixnets, coinswap
  • Encrypted Transactions
  • Encrypted p2p network
  • Networking code overhaul
  • p2p message layer replacement
  • Libconsensus refactor
  • Non-outsourceable mining research
  • Fraud proofs
  • SNARKs research, zero knowledge contingent payments, etc.
  • Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MASTs)
  • Blockchain sharding
  • Formal verification, correctness
  • Payment protocol
  • Validation cost metric
  • Security audits
  • Transaction fee estimation