Bitcoin Core has announced a new sponsorship program, a move that finds the largely volunteer community that develops the open-source bitcoin software opening its development process up to funding from industry stakeholders.
The announcement comes weeks after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $900,000 support fund aimed at promoting bitcoin development. In that instance, however, the funds are being directed to three specific developers – Gavin Andresen, Cory Fields and Wladimir van der Laan.
In interview, Van der Laan, the project’s lead maintainer told CoinDesk that the initiative grew out of desire from startups in the bitcoin space to help support the open-source project financially.
"A few companies are showing interest in funding Bitcoin Core development, which could be a big help to us," he said. "It would allow more directed development in addition to the open-source approach we’ve always used."
Van der Laan went on to explain: "This means that some tasks that either require longer research or development, such as sync algorithm and privacy improvements, or the (usually perceived as) less sexy tasks such as documentation and Windows support suffer. Also more delicate areas such as the wallet currently suffer from lack of active development." This funding, according to the announcement, would go beyond simply funding specific projects.
According to Core’s announcement of the sponsorship program, the project needs funding to help support quality assurance testing as well as money "for communications, public relations, documentation and other resources".
Van der Laan told CoinDesk that he’d like to see new documentation for both users and developers, as well as improvements to bitcoin transaction privacy and work on the Lightning Network project.
A list of other top priorities identified by the project can be found here . Decentralized support Van der Laan said that under the arrangement, companies that are sponsoring a project will remain […]