Maelstrom, the household workplace of BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, has printed its first annual report for its Bitcoin Grant Program — revealing that 4 lively builders have collectively superior Bitcoin’s privateness, safety, and codebase resilience throughout a 20-month program that started in October 2024, with 5 builders supported in whole since inception.
The report, authored by Grant Program Administrator Jonathan Bier, covers the technical output of 4 at the moment lively grantees — Rkrux, Stratospher, Benalleng, and Macgyver — two of whom work on Bitcoin Core immediately and two of whom focus completely on advancing Bitcoin’s privateness infrastructure. Grants are issued on 12-month contracts, paid month-to-month in Bitcoin, and may be stacked as much as a cap of $400,000 per developer per yr. This system is wholly funded by Maelstrom, per the report.
Bitcoin Core: The Unglamorous Work That Retains The Community Secure
Two grantees are devoted to Bitcoin Core — the software program that runs the nodes securing probably the most invaluable monetary community ever constructed.
Rkrux, a grantee since October 2024, has turn out to be one of many mission’s most prolific reviewers. In 2025 alone he made 1,155 evaluation feedback throughout greater than 200 pull requests, rating him the eleventh most lively commenter on the whole codebase, per a dashboard constructed by developer Niklas Gögge cited within the report. Within the first 5 months of 2026 he added greater than 400 extra PR feedback.
His work spans MuSig2 — a protocol that makes multisignature transactions indistinguishable from single-signature transactions on-chain, concurrently enhancing privateness and decreasing charges — in addition to the deprecation of legacy wallets in favor of contemporary descriptor-based wallets that enhance interoperability throughout the ecosystem.
Stratospher, a grantee since November 2025, has centered on the areas the place bugs carry probably the most catastrophic potential penalties — consensus-critical validation code and the peer-to-peer community. She found and stuck an undefined conduct bug in Bitcoin Core’s FindMostWorkChain perform, contributed to the elimination of the BLOCK_FAILED_CHILD flag, and labored on DLEQ cryptographic proofs in libsecp256k1 in relation to Silent Funds.
She additionally introduced on the Africa Bitcoin Convention on two panels protecting open supply growth and privateness. Her report notes immediately that bugs in consensus code may cause nodes to disagree on the state of the community — a failure mode with no clear restoration path.
BTC's worth traits to the draw back on the day by day chart. Supply: BTCUSD on Tradingview
Privateness: The Infrastructure Bitcoin Nonetheless Wants
The opposite two grantees are wholly devoted to Bitcoin privateness applied sciences — an space the report describes as central to Maelstrom’s philosophy.
Benalleng, funded since June 2025, works full time on Payjoin — a transaction protocol that enables each the sender and receiver to contribute inputs to a Bitcoin transaction, systematically breaking the surveillance heuristic that each one inputs in a transaction belong to the identical occasion. The Payjoin API has been built-in into Bull Bitcoin and Cake Pockets, with 5 or extra extra pockets integrations at the moment in progress, per the report.
Bindings for Python, Javascript, Dart, and CSharp have been launched to maximise developer accessibility. The report makes an argument that deserves consideration: even minority adoption of Payjoin degrades chain surveillance capabilities for the whole community, together with customers who by no means use Payjoin themselves — a game-theoretic asymmetry Maelstrom considers one in every of Bitcoin’s most underappreciated privateness levers.
Macgyver, additionally funded since June 2025, is concentrated on Silent Funds — a protocol proposed by Ruben Somsen in 2022 that enables senders to make a number of funds to a recipient utilizing a single static handle, with out ever reusing that handle on-chain. Pockets adoption has progressed materially over the previous 12 months: Blindbit-Desktop, Cake Pockets, and Dana Pockets now help each ship and obtain phases, whereas Sparrow Pockets and Nunchuk have added ship help.
Bitcoin Core has draft implementations for each phases however they continue to be on maintain pending a dependency on the Silent Funds module in libsecp256k1, per the report. Macgyver has formalized the Silent Funds roadmap, produced BIP-375 check vectors, proposed the primary working BIP-375 {hardware} signer implementation for Coldcard, and arranged month-to-month Silent Funds working group meetups.
What The Program Represents
Maelstrom’s grant framework is intentionally slender — it funds open-source Bitcoin protocol work solely, with no industrial strings hooked up and no token incentives concerned. The evaluation committee is 2 folks: Arthur Hayes and Jonathan Bier. The funding comes from a single supply.
And the work being achieved — reviewing consensus code, hardening P2P privateness, constructing transaction obfuscation tooling — is the type of growth that receives no headlines, generates no token worth and but underpins the safety and privateness of a community that now holds a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in worth.
This growth marks a pivotal second for the way the nascent sector’s most profitable members select to present again. A household workplace that has profited considerably from Bitcoin’s appreciation deploying capital immediately into the protocol’s open-source growth stack — paid in Bitcoin, reviewed by friends, and printed transparently — is a mannequin the trade hardly ever produces and nearly by no means paperwork this clearly.
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