Renewal of Chris Coverdale’s Bitcoin Developer Grant

BitMEX has extended Chris Coverdale’s Bitcoin developer grant until May 2023, a six month extension from the previous grant. This is the third consecutive time BitMEX has provided Chris a grant and BitMEX continues to support his work for the long term. 

Chris is working on implementing Stratum V2, which is a new Bitcoin mining protocol, which controls how miners connect to mining pools. The new protocol was designed by Bitcoin engineers such as Pavel Moravec, Jan Čapek and Matt Corallo. Stratum V2 could improve Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, by improving the security of communication for block templates and mining submissions. Part of the protocol also allows miners to select their own transactions to negotiate with the pool, rather than being given the block header to work on by the pool.

Alongside BitMEX, other organisations such as Foundry Digital, Galaxy Digital and Spiral are contributing to the development and implementation of StratumV2. The push for StratumV2 was recently covered in an article by Coindesk.

Commenting on the grant, Chris said:

I would like to thank BitMEX for their continued support which has allowed me to work on open source software with complete freedom and no strings attached. With the support of BitMEX, I’ve been able to contribute to the Stratum V2 reference implementation and my goal is to help Stratum V2 reach production and build the required template provider in Bitcoin Core. Thank you again to BitMEX for supporting open source software and Bitcoin development.

Steve Lee of Spiral, another organisation which funds Stratum V2 development said:

Chris has been a big part of the open-source Stratum V2 reference implementation, with his Template Producer work to bring Bitcoin Core up-to-date with Stratum V2. He’s been great to work with and a team player.

Chris’s grant is based on the open source template grant contract. BitMEX, the platform which invented the perpetual swap contract, is proud to support open source Bitcoin development and engineering, aimed at improving Bitcoin’s robustness, scalability and privacy.