Maelstrom — the family office of BitMEX co‑founder Arthur Hayes — published its first annual report for the Bitcoin Grant Program, giving rare transparency into a small but impactful wave of funding for Bitcoin protocol work. Launched in October 2024, the 20‑month program has supported five developers in total, with four currently active. The report, written by Grant Program Administrator Jonathan Bier, highlights how dedicated grantees are strengthening Bitcoin’s privacy, security, and core codebase.
Program basics
- Grants are 12‑month contracts, paid monthly in Bitcoin, and can be stacked up to $400,000 per developer per year.
- Maelstrom wholly funds the program; the review committee comprises Arthur Hayes and Jonathan Bier.
- The program funds only open‑source Bitcoin protocol work — no commercial strings, no tokens.
Who’s being funded and what they’ve done
The report profiles four active developers: two focused on Bitcoin Core (the node software that secures the network) and two working exclusively on privacy infrastructure.
1) Rkrux (on Bitcoin Core; funded since Oct 2024)
- Has become one of Bitcoin Core’s most prolific reviewers. In 2025 he posted 1,155 review comments across 200+ pull requests, ranking 11th by comment volume on the codebase (per a developer dashboard cited in the report); he added 400+ PR comments in the first five months of 2026.
- Work areas include MuSig2 (which makes multisig transactions indistinguishable from single‑sig, improving privacy and lowering fees) and deprecating legacy wallets in favor of descriptor‑based wallets for better interoperability.
2) Stratospher (on Bitcoin Core; funded since Nov 2025)
- Focuses on high‑stakes parts of the code: consensus‑critical validation and the P2P network.
- Discovered and fixed an undefined behavior bug in FindMostWorkChain, contributed to removing the BLOCK_FAILED_CHILD flag, and worked on DLEQ cryptographic proofs in libsecp256k1 related to Silent Payments.
- Presented on open‑source development and privacy at the Africa Bitcoin Conference. The report underscores that bugs in consensus code can lead to node divergence — a failure mode with no clean recovery.
3) Benalleng (privacy; funded since June 2025)
- Works full time on Payjoin, a transaction protocol where both sender and receiver add inputs to a transaction, breaking the heuristic that all inputs belong to the same party.
- Payjoin integrations: Bull Bitcoin and Cake Wallet already support it, with five or more additional wallet integrations in progress.
- Has released bindings for Python, JavaScript, Dart, and C# to help developers adopt Payjoin. The report argues that even minority adoption of Payjoin weakens chain surveillance network‑wide — a game‑theoretic privacy benefit that Maelstrom highlights.
4) Macgyver (privacy; funded since June 2025)
- Focuses on Silent Payments, a Ruben Somsen‑proposed protocol that lets senders make multiple payments to a recipient using a single static address without reusing it on‑chain.
- Wallet adoption advanced materially: Blindbit‑Desktop, Cake Wallet, and Dana Wallet now support both send and receive phases; Sparrow Wallet and Nunchuk have added send support.
- Bitcoin Core has draft implementations for both phases but progress is paused pending a Silent Payments module in libsecp256k1. Macgyver formalized the roadmap, produced BIP‑375 test vectors, proposed a working BIP‑375 hardware signer implementation for Coldcard, and organized monthly working‑group meetups.
Why this matters
Maelstrom’s report highlights an underappreciated but crucial truth: much of the engineering that secures Bitcoin — consensus review, P2P hardening, and transaction obfuscation tooling — happens quietly, attracts no headlines, and doesn’t move token prices. Yet it underpins a network that now secures hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
The program is notable for its simplicity and accountability: Bitcoin‑paid grants, peer review, public reporting, and a narrow focus on open source protocol work. Maelstrom’s approach — a successful sector actor channeling capital directly into Bitcoin’s engineering stack and documenting the outcomes — is an uncommon model in crypto philanthropy, and the report may serve as a useful template for others who want to fund public‑good protocol development.
(Image sources cited in the report: Grok for cover image, TradingView for BTCUSD chart.)
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