Making bitcoin more than an investment.

Bitcoin is the best money. It should be used like it. We build and fund free, open-source projects aimed at making bitcoin the planet’s preferred currency.

Latest Updates

Quarterly Update Q1 and Q2 2024

Quarterly Update Q1 and Q2 2024

Perhaps our best Spiral newsletter ever, this extremely late post covers all the bases: weather-induced spirituality, cosmic Jerome Powells, and, most importantly, the phrase “senior technical fungus.

Who is Bitcoin?

Who is Bitcoin?

People said that a seven-foot-tall anthropomorphic bitcoin puppet was a pipe dream. They said it couldn’t be done. So we did it, and then we blogged about why we did it.

Spiral is Hiring Bitcoin Wizards

Spiral is Hiring Bitcoin Wizards

We're building an R&D team of bitcoin wizards to improve security, decentralization, privacy, and scaling across all layers of bitcoin.

The Book of Bitcoin Mythology: Vol. 2

The Book of Bitcoin Mythology: Vol. 2

Back by semi-popular demand, we’re covering and uncovering some commonly held myths about the security of bitcoin, from how much of a threat hackers really pose to whether lawmakers can legislate your coins out of existence.

FOSS Bitcoin Grants

Get paid in bitcoin to work on bitcoin. Our open-source bitcoin grant program supports developers and designers in over a dozen countries.

Bitcoin Project Grants

  • Bitcoin Core
    Bitcoin Core

    Considered the most important and necessary bitcoin software, as the foundation for its security and consensus, Core is the reference implementation that makes bitcoin tick.

  • Bitcoin Dev Kit
    Bitcoin Dev Kit

    Some have called BDK the Sancho Panza to LDK’s Don Quixote. (No one has ever called it this.) BDK is to on-chain bitcoin what LDK is to Lightning.

  • Lightning Dev Kit
    Lightning Dev Kit

    There’s a lot we could say about LDK. But why bother when a talking hoodie with a beard already said it better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOT78Bgy1Qw

  • Bitcoin Design
    Bitcoin Design

    Are you a wallet dev with a design question? Judging by what many wallets look like, you should. The BDC does for design what open-source has done for bitcoin since day 1.

  • BTCPay Server
    BTCPay Server

    Not just our first grant recipient, but our first to receive two more. BTCPay Server is an open-source payments processor that squanders money on ironic business cards.

  • Validating Lightning Signer
    Validating Lightning Signer

    Really basic LN infrastructure project that improves security by enabling signed transactions within enterprise HSMs, mobile phone secure elements, and hardware wallets.

  • The Eye of Satoshi
    The Eye of Satoshi

    LN-focused watchtower that monitors blockchain transactions for malicious channel peers attempting to take off with other people’s beautiful coins.

  • CoinSwap
    CoinSwap

    An evolution of the techniques pioneered by CoinJoins, CoinSwap helps you stick it to the man by substantially improving bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility.

  • Summer of Bitcoin
    Summer of Bitcoin

    Global summer internship program focused on introducing university students to bitcoin and open-source development. In addition to funding the program, interns receive $2,500 in bitcoin and cursed jewelry.

  • Wallet Scrutiny
    Wallet Scrutiny

    Not everyone has the time to painstakingly check what’s running on their wallet against public source code. But somehow, everyone at WS does.

  • ZeroSync
    ZeroSync

    Our first grantee working on bitcoin ZK proofs, a mechanic which allows nodes to quickly sync compressed blockchain data instead of countless potentially embarrassing transactions.

Bitcoin Developer Grants

  • Vasil Dimov
    Vasil Dimov

    FOSS veteran (since 2005) with a focus on P2P and privacy. He's helped add support for Tor V3, I2P, and CJDNS in Bitcoin Core. Pretty nice of him.

  • Gary Fuches
    Gary Fuches

    Passionate advocate for SegWit 2x and blockchain technology, Gary was our intern only a year before receiving our largest developer grant ever. God only knows what he did with it.

  • Bitcoin Zavior
    Bitcoin Zavior

    Contributor to LDK and BDK. Photon project maintainer. Developing a React Native version of BDK. One of those grantees who’s tough to sum up without a) going over the word count, and b)

  • Ruben Somsen
    Ruben Somsen

    Spacechains developer and owner of no fewer than three iguanas. This probably isn’t true but the truth has never stopped us before.

  • Justin Moellar
    Justin Moellar

    There's a lot to be said about Fedimint dev Justin Moellar, but this unintentionally hilarious line from his proposal says it best: "I have had exposure to almost every kind of database."

  • Sebastian Kung
    Sebastian Kung

    Developing libbitcoinkernel, which extracts Bitcoin Core’s consensus engine. This only sounds complicated because it is. But not to Sebastian, who is smarter than you and I.

  • Matt Morehouse
    Matt Morehouse

    Like many ex-Googlers, Matt Morehouse is doing penance via bitcoin by taking on important Lightning security work. Whether this will save his eternal soul, who are we to say?

  • Johannes Hofmann
    Johannes Hofmann

    Bitcoin data scientist specializing in on-and-off-chain analysis. Easily the most professional headshot on this page. Just look at that swoosh. Swoosh!

  • Joschisan
    Joschisan

    There’s no evidence to suggest that anything we write here will be read by anyone, so we can probably say anything we want. Giraffe refrigerator. Rainbow spaghetti. Tuxedo forest.

  • Esraa
    Esraa

    Esraa is a pseudonymous dev, so there’s nothing we can say about him except that he works on PayJoins with Dan Gould, and you should never say his name three times in front of a mirror.

  • Dan Gould
    Dan Gould

    I misspelled Dan’s name both as “Gold” and “Gourd,” which made me wonder how much a gourd made of gold would be worth. According to ChatGPT, roughly $33,500. Congratulations, Dan.

  • thesimplekid
    thesimplekid

    If you’re reading thesimplekid’s spiral.xyz bio instead of the tweet we did about their Cashu Dev Kit grant, you’re missing out. It’s in our Twitter feed somewhere. Go fish it out. It’s worth it.

  • siv2r
    siv2r

    People keep wanting Spiral grants despite our contract stipulating that every bird they encounter will eavesdrop on them until eternity. They’re birds, so they won’t be able to share anything, but they will know.

  • Nick Johnson
    Nick Johnson

    Improving privacy with a BIP 324 Rust library that enables light client encrypted messages, and BIP 000, which muffles the screams you hear whenever you sell bitcoin because you "need to eat".

  • spacebear21
    spacebear21

    Contributor to the incredibly important PayJoin Dev Kit, which brings privacy, fungibility, scale, and Evil Knievel caliber stunt work to bitcoin.

  • Bob McElrath
    Bob McElrath

    The more people with palindromes for names in our grantee roster, the better. Kayak. Deed. Rotator. Noon. Racecar. Bob.

  • Leo Nash
    Leo Nash

    Working on Musig2 Taproot channels to make the LN’s onchain footprint completely invisible or just slightly translucent depending on how much they want to mess with people.

  • l0rinc
    l0rinc

    Exactly who you imagine when you think of a prolific FOSS dev, L0RINC is pseudonymous code chameleon with his hands in more pies than someone trying to ruin a birthday party.

  • Maurice Poirrier
    Maurice Poirrier

    Lead maintainer for the LNDK BOLT12 project, and if he does a really good job, we'll let him rename it anything he wants: BOLT21, BOLT420, BOLT666. Whatever for him, really.

Bitcoin PM Grants

  • Pavlenex
    Pavlenex

    His cred as a bitcoin PM netted him a grant despite the fact that he tried to bribe us by stuffing live carp into our mailboxes. And the Bitcoin Design Guide is better for it.

  • Will Clark
    Will Clark

    A Bitcoin Core PM who was PMing Bitcoin Core before we decided that our grant program needed a Bitcoin Core PM to PM Bitcoin Core.

  • Austin Krauss
    Austin Krauss

    Helping develop a programming Lightning workshop that will lead to a programming Lightning book that will lead to a strange, programming Lightning shack on the outskirts of a deserted mining town.

Bitcoin Grantee Alumni

  • Tankred Hase
    Tankred Hase

    UX-focused dev building Photon, a FOSS library that simplifies how new users get coins off exchanges. No more 24-word seeds. Just enter a PIN and go. But where will you go?

  • Justin Sun
    Justin Sun

    Our most well-known grantee by far, Justin Sun created Moon University, an open-source bitcoin video library. Now he’s helping two other grantees build BDK.

  • Thorbjørn König
    Thorbjørn König

    Thorbjørn brings 20 years of design experience to radically rethinking how people manage their private keys. Don't worry. We vetted him.

  • Jamaal Montasser
    Jamaal Montasser

    Researcher deepening our understanding of how people use (and most likely don’t use) the Bitcoin Core wallet, placing particular emphasis on UX, engineering, and accessibility.

  • Maggie Valentine
    Maggie Valentine

    Designer simplifying wallet onboarding flows by reducing technical jargon and increasing user education, ultimately making bitcoin accessible to more people. Even copywriters.

  • Patricia Estevão
    Patricia Estevão

    What motivates people to use bitcoin? What do people hope to gain from bitcoin? Is bitcoin a sandwich? Just some of the questions this UX designer and researcher aims to answer.

  • Riccardo Casatta
    Riccardo Casatta

    FOSS dev building BDK and Firma, didn’t read the grant before signing it and is now condemned to spend eternity aboard a ghost ship where everyone refers to bitcoin as blockchain.

  • Leon Johnson
    Leon Johnson

    The creator of Advancing Bitcoin, Leon is working on so many things that it is kind of hard to capture them all in six lines. So I won't try.

  • Johns Beharry
    Johns Beharry

    Hybrid product designer bringing order to on-chain, layer 2, CoinJoins, BLTs, PayJoins, and PSBTs by helping develop the payments section of the Bitcoin Design Guide.

  • Gloria Zhao
    Gloria Zhao

    The first Brink Fellow, Gloria is working on Package Mempool Accept, which makes second layer protocols like Lightning and unlimited breadsticks safer, more reliable, and private.

  • Lloyd Fournier
    Lloyd Fournier

    If applied cryptography experimentation library, alternative LN payment channel construct, and open DLC-based oracle spec mean anything to you... Lloyd?

  • Steve Myers
    Steve Myers

    Developer developing the Bitcoin Development Kit, an all-in-one resource that makes it 10x easier for developers to develop on-chain bitcoin wallets. Develop.

  • ZmnSCPxj
    ZmnSCPxj

    A Lightning and C-Lightning legend, there’s only so much we can say about ZmnSCPxj. But we won’t even say that because no one called ZmnSCPxj is in it for the limelight.

  • Doc Sharp
    Doc Sharp

    Pseudonymous designer focused on adding Lightning UX resources to the Bitcoin Design Guide so that by the time Lightning is ubiquitous, even bankers will know how to use it.

  • Stephen DeLorme
    Stephen DeLorme

    Designer helping add Lightning Network best practices to the Bitcoin Design Guide. Recipient of the best grant announcement tweet (and perhaps best tweet) of all time.

  • John Cantrell
    John Cantrell

    Pseudonymous dev named after a character from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, a giant book that every developer owns but hasn’t read. John is using BDK and LDK to build a boundary pushing wallet.

  • Mempool
    Mempool

    The recipient of our first-ever bitcoin-denominated grant, Mempool is the only bitcoin block explorer that doesn’t look like it was designed under duress.

  • Dhruv Mehta
    Dhruv Mehta

    Stick figure and Core contributor working on BIP324, leveraging the bitcoin-seeder to allow authenticated seeds, automation, and fuzz testing coverage.

  • Raj Maitra
    Raj Maitra

    Rust ecosystem and Bitcoin Development Kit contributor. First dev in India doing funded FOSS bitcoin work. Rabbit hole enthusiast. Actual rabbit.

  • Josh Kitman
    Josh Kitman

    Our first grantee working on Fedimints, Josh is also an actor whose credits include Anonymous webcasts and V for Vendetta, a movie about doing karate in a wig.

  • Chris Belcher
    Chris Belcher

    Lead developer of a CoinSwap implementation that massively improves bitcoin privacy and fungibility.

  • Sergi Delgado
    Sergi Delgado

    Former Lead Developer for the Eye of Satoshi project. Currently enjoying the vertigo-inducing view from Chaincode’s 38th floor New York office.

  • Fi3
    Fi3

    Another pseudonymous dev. Fi3 is helping develop Stratum V2, a neutral FOSS implementation that can be used by any miner or mining pool in possession of the magic ring.

  • Okjodom
    Okjodom

    Pseudonymous robot-faced Fedimint developer helping build Fedimint, a decentralized custody solution for bitcoin that, unfortunately, requires users to have friends.

  • 0xB10C
    0xB10C

    Prolific developer and grant proposal writer often regarded as a genius by our copywriter, who was too lazy or too incompetent to summarize his project here. Hell of a developer either way.

  • Jon Atack
    Jon Atack

    Once accurately described as “the bitcoin dev who looks the most like they could body you at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2,” Jon’s been going ham on Core for a minute now, man.

  • thunderbiscuit
    thunderbiscuit

    The Bitcoin Dev Kit expedites how engineers build bitcoin wallets. It’s among the most important projects we support. So, naturally, one of its leading developers is called thunderbiscuit.

  • Daniela Brozzoni
    Daniela Brozzoni

    Completing 'non-core' BDK modules. Writing BDK onboarding docs. Using timelocks and multiple keys to build user-friendly decaying multi-sig. Helping build the BDK Rust Library.

  • Evan Lin
    Evan Lin

    Grantee helping develop the Bitcoin Development Kit, an SDK that six of our grantees have worked on because of Steve Myers’ undeniable charisma. If only Spiral had such a Steve.

  • Matthew Ramsden
    Matthew Ramsden

    An experienced iOS developer working on native Swift apps for BDK and a bunch of other stuff that I won’t include here because I have the technical chops of an old shoe.

  • Christoph Ono
    Christoph Ono

    Designer bringing decentralized structure to the 1000+ person Bitcoin Design Community. As the first designer grant recipient, he takes the blame if things don't work out.

  • Daniel Nordh
    Daniel Nordh

    A contributor to the Bitcoin Design Community since before it was a community, Daniel is helping create the private key management section of the Bitcoin Design Guide.

  • Mogashni
    Mogashni

    UX specialist developing a UX Research Toolkit, contributing to the Wallet Improvement Project, and legally anything else we write here.

  • Michael Haase
    Michael Haase

    Product designer working on bitcoin inheritance and collaborative custody. So if you kids ever take off with your coins, look no further for who to blame.

  • John Moffett
    John Moffett

    Introducing the first Spiral grantee to be selected by an entranced fortune teller. He’s done some Bitcoin Core work but besides that—zero credentials. Lucky for John I guess.

  • Amiti Uttarwar
    Amiti Uttarwar

    Mentor and coach teaching other bitcoin developers how to be better bitcoin developers, all of whom will hopefully go on to do the same.

  • Alyssa Hertig
    Alyssa Hertig

    Developer doing LNDK work to add BOLT 12 for LND and Eye of Satoshi projects. She’s also a talented and serious writer, which our team hasn’t had until now.

  • plebhash
    plebhash

    They’re working on StratumV2 and are passionate about mining and, in their own words, “biased towards the plebs,” as are we all.

  • Sean Giligan
    Sean Giligan

    FOSS Dev building a Secure Enclave version of VLS, also a Spiral grantee, but one that failed to warn Sean about the Trail of Treats running through the woods.

  • Rachel Rybarcyzk
    Rachel Rybarcyzk

    Refactoring SRI’s protocol and role logic despite its code debt. Her goal is to achieve production-ready protocols and roles, resulting in a cleaner repo and clearer directory. Or so she says.

@spiralbtc

Small team. Big mission. Medium-sized everything else.

  • Steve Lee

    Steve Lee

    Just a regular bitcoin PM who doesn’t cast a shadow for some reason.

  • Val Wallace

    Val Wallace

    Lightning Network stan and author of our popular Twitter account.

  • Jeff Czyz

    Jeff Czyz

    Long-distance runner. Contemplative developer. Online dating profile with a lot to be desired.

  • Matt Corallo

    Matt Corallo

    Dev proficient in HTML and CSS. Known for his diverse sense of style and passive approach to social media.

  • Haley Berkoe

    Haley Berkoe

    FUD-busting PM. Advocate for women in bitcoin. First Spiral team member to venture into the basement and live to tell about it.

  • Conor Okus

    Conor Okus

    Likable guy who thinks he's found his dream job. He doesn't know that his dream job has found him, too. And it's hungry.

  • Elias Rohrer

    Elias Rohrer

    He’s been called the greatest bitcoin developer of the mid-19th century. Confused, we hired him immediately.

  • Greg Sanders

    Greg Sanders

    We have high hopes for Greg. Whether he feels the same way about us remains to be seen, but he’d better if he knows what’s good for him.

  • Yuval Kogman

    Yuval Kogman

    Our second bitcoin wizard hire. One more and we will rule Middle-earth.

  • Wilmer Paulino

    Wilmer Paulino

    One of the three most influential Lightning Network developers named Wilmer.

  • Joost Jager

    Joost Jager

    Joost came aboard with a simple request: world-changing impact, or at the very least, the kind of failure that makes for a compelling memoir.

  • Ben Carman

    Ben Carman

    Ben once called our grant program the "gold standard." Knowing he wouldn't qualify for one, he smartly applied for a full-time job with the other burnouts.