Nexo, a financial service provider for digital assets, has announced a $150k donation to Brink, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging, nurturing, and supporting the open-source Bitcoin development community.
This follows the contribution of Jack Dorsey, who recently granted 1 BTC to the organization as well.
As Bitcoin continues to experience upward growth, prominent industry leaders and stakeholders are focusing on promoting open-source cryptocurrency development to support the protocol that laid the foundation for a trillion-dollar-and-growing blockchain economy.
Like any software project, Bitcoin requires routine maintenance, research, and development to work optimally. As the network continues to expand, future upkeep costs will also increase. Thus, to further the cause, Nexo has donated $150,000 to Brink, an NGO supporting open-source Bitcoin development. These funds will help Brink add more educational and mentorship programs to improve and expand the developer community.
Antoni Trenchev, Nexo Co-Founder and Managing Partner, states:
“The $150k donation marks Nexo’s commitment to open-source funding and supporting Bitcoin.”
Brink plans to utilize these funds later this month to assist individual Bitcoin developers through Grants. The NGO already operates a variety of programs that help Bitcoin developers and researchers financially. Its fellowship program introduces Bitcoin development to exceptional developers from other sectors, while its grant program funds existing Bitcoin contributors.
Since the underlying architecture is stable and the Bitcoin consensus protocol seldom changes, some assume developers no longer need to work on it. The fact, however, is that Bitcoin Core contributors frequently find and fix minor bugs with varying degrees of impact.
Developers are continually discovering memory, CPU, bandwidth exhaustion bugs, remote code execution, and logical errors that can hinder overall performance and functions. Although most bugs and glitches have been discovered and patched since Bitcoin’s early days, developers have solved more than 50 vulnerabilities over the past decade, both minor and significant.
Most of the developers’ work is handled behind the curtains. Often, these efforts aren’t highlighted for several years after bug fixes are applied to protect users and prevent nefarious operators from taking advantage of these software exploits.
As the Bitcoin network’s value increases, the potential cost of repairing one of these vulnerabilities also rises, as does the adversaries’ incentive to exploit them. Accordingly, experienced protocol developers will always be needed to sustain the crypto-economy infrastructure.
“The deep knowledge that Bitcoin Core contributors have accumulated over several years is an important part of the network’s worth. The Bitcoin network would slowly deteriorate and gradually become unusable if developers were unable to manage and expand the core software”, says Brink co-founder and Executive Director John Newbery, who is delighted that a major industry player is committed to supporting open-source development.
While cryptocurrency does represent a large market, only a few crypto-businesses give back to the community by supporting open-source development work. Nexo’s donation parallels other prominent industry players’ commitments, following awards from Square Crypto, Gemini, Kraken, and the Human Rights Foundation.
Nexo’s Trenchev opines:
“We’re proud to be part of such an exclusive club, but we also believe the industry should do more. What if some of the public companies that recently started allocating billions of dollars to Bitcoin also put a small percentage of that, say 0.25%, toward Bitcoin development?”