Following on from our 28 May 2019 announcement of a donation to the MIT Digital Currency initiative, we are delighted to announce a US$60,000 grant to Bitcoin Core contributor, Michael Ford (AKA fanquake). Michael has been a Bitcoin contributor since 2012 and has recently been added to the list of maintainers for the Bitcoin Core software project.
HDR Global Trading Limited (which owns and operates the BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform) is proud to support Bitcoin development and engineering, aimed at improving Bitcoin’s robustness, scalability and privacy. The grant is non exclusive and requires Michael to work on Bitcoin Core. We are pleased to be Michael’s first financial supporter during his time as a Bitcoin Core maintainer.
Sam Reed, CTO and co-founder of HDR Global Trading Limited, made the following remark about the grant:
HDR Global Trading Limited, like all other companies in the cryptocurrency space, relies heavily on the (mostly-volunteer) work of coders dedicated to the mission and ideals of Bitcoin. This work is difficult, demanding, and often thankless. We believe it is the duty of corporations to give back to the projects from which they benefit – and from which their very business model stems. Without the millions of free man-hours from dedicated OSS developers powering everything from our operating systems, to our web servers, to our ops tools and Bitcoin itself, the BitMEX trading platform could not have been built. We don’t forget this gift. Therefore, HDR considers this grant, provided on a no-strings-attached basis, to be only a small part of an ongoing commitment to bolstering Bitcoin and other OSS projects for the benefit of all.