Members of the Bitcoin Community Create $1.2M Grant

A large group of the companies and innovators from the Bitcoin community have announced the creation of a US$1.2 million grant fund towards Bitcoin development. The open source project has enriched the lives of many globally, and the grant aims to support optimizing the protocol.

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Bitcoin Community Initiates $1.2 Million Bitcoin Protocol Development Grant

A new grant fund has been initiated for Bitcoin development by members of the community and industry leaders. The Bitcoin protocol is a large ongoing project that needs maintenance in order to stay innovative and scale for future users. Funding over the course of the years has been limited so many companies have decided to help bolster development with this grant program.

The grant aims to support programmers and teams that work with the Bitcoin protocol. The goal is to create a better diversification and improve the freedom of choice for all Bitcoin users. In an effort to create diversity the grant donors have established a set of principles to establish moving forward.      

No “Official” Bitcoin: No particular implementation of the Bitcoin protocol holds claim to being the “official” version of Bitcoin. Multiple Implementations: Diversity of bitcoin protocol implementation along with a variety of development teams is a net gain for the bitcoin community. Diversity of Innovation: The presence of more developers and more development teams will lead to greater diversity of innovation and solutions to the problems we will inevitably face as a growing industry. Bitcoin is Leaderless: Bitcoin is a leaderless community comprised of many parts, and no team of developers has decision-making authority for the entire community. No Censorship: Disagreement is healthy within a complex community such as ours. Yet the benefits of discussion, debate, and dissent require communication channels to remain free and open. Although we respect the right of private communities to run themselves as they see fit, the signers of this statement implore members of bitcoin to reject censorship and encourage them to support those platforms where a free and open discussion is allowed to take place.

Members of the community who have participated in this grant program hope to find common ground with the above statements. The industry is still quite young, and by showing good faith within these principles, Bitcoin development can progress. Many hope to start healing the fracture and mend the current divide by instead focusing on protocol improvements.

Many Community Members Supporting The Initiative

Companies and individuals who have openly supported this pledge include:

Bitcoin.com, Bitmain, ANX, BitBank, BitBays, Bitcoin Colombia, Blockchain, BTCGhana, Xapo, CoinATMRadar, Mycelium, Purse, Luxstack, and many more. Additionally, individual signing supporters include Brian Armstrong co-founder of Coinbase, Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com, and Leonhard Weese of the Bitcoin Association Hong Kong. Furthermore, those who wish to sign in support may also join the pledge to keep Bitcoin diversified and open.

If people are interested in additional information on the grant and are looking to apply requests should be sent to apply@bitcoindevelopmentgrant.com. The website bitcoindevelopmentgrant.com will be fully transparent and keep the community informed of developments and major updates.

The signing members of the Bitcoin community hope this grant and applied principles will push forth continued innovation.

What do you think about the $1.2 million grant towards Bitcoin protocol development? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock.

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