Maelstrom’s Bitcoin Grants Hit 20 Months — 5 Developers, 4 Active, Here’s What They’ve Accomplished
Maelstrom, the household workplace of BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, has published its first annual report for its Bitcoin Grant Program — revealing that 4 energetic 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 (*4*) (*20*) Bier, covers the technical output of 4 at the moment energetic grantees — Rkrux, Stratospher, Benalleng, and Macgyver — two of whom work on Bitcoin Core straight and two of whom focus fully 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 12 months. The program is wholly funded by Maelstrom, per the report.
Bitcoin Core: The Unglamorous Work That Keeps The Network Safe
Two grantees are devoted to Bitcoin Core — the software program that runs the nodes securing essentially the most worthwhile monetary community ever constructed.
Rkrux, a grantee since October 2024, has change into one of many challenge’s most prolific reviewers. In 2025 alone he made 1,155 overview feedback throughout greater than 200 pull requests, rating him the eleventh most energetic commenter on the complete codebase, per a dashboard constructed by developer Niklas Gögge cited within the report. In the primary 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 bettering privateness and lowering charges — in addition to the deprecation of legacy wallets in favor of recent descriptor-based wallets that enhance interoperability throughout the ecosystem.
Stratospher, a grantee since November 2025, has targeted on the areas the place bugs carry essentially 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 Payments.
She additionally introduced on the Africa Bitcoin Conference on two panels protecting open supply growth and privateness. Her report notes straight that bugs in consensus code may cause nodes to disagree on the state of the community — a failure mode with no clear restoration path.
Privacy: The Infrastructure Bitcoin Still Needs
The different 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 every one inputs in a transaction belong to the identical celebration. The Payjoin API has been built-in into Bull Bitcoin and Cake Wallet, 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 complete community, together with customers who by no means use Payjoin themselves — a game-theoretic asymmetry Maelstrom considers certainly one of Bitcoin’s most underappreciated privateness levers.
Macgyver, additionally funded since June 2025, is concentrated on Silent Payments — a protocol proposed by Ruben Somsen in 2022 that enables senders to make a number of funds to a recipient utilizing a single static tackle, with out ever reusing that tackle on-chain. Wallet adoption has progressed materially over the previous 12 months: Blindbit-Desktop, Cake Wallet, and Dana Wallet now help each ship and obtain phases, whereas Sparrow Wallet 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 Payments module in libsecp256k1, per the report. Macgyver has formalized the Silent Payments roadmap, produced BIP-375 check vectors, proposed the primary working BIP-375 {hardware} signer implementation for Coldcard, and arranged month-to-month Silent Payments working group meetups.
What The Program Represents
Maelstrom’s grant framework is intentionally slim — it funds open-source Bitcoin protocol work solely, with no industrial strings connected and no token incentives concerned. The overview committee is 2 individuals: Arthur Hayes and (*20*) Bier. The funding comes from a single supply.
And the work being finished — reviewing consensus code, hardening P2P privateness, constructing transaction obfuscation tooling — is the form of growth that receives no headlines, generates no token value 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 a way the nascent sector’s most profitable contributors select to provide again. A household workplace that has profited considerably from Bitcoin’s appreciation deploying capital straight into the protocol’s open-source growth stack — paid in Bitcoin, reviewed by friends, and revealed transparently — is a mannequin the trade not often produces and virtually by no means paperwork this clearly.
Cover picture from Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
