Bitcoin Core has no payroll, which leaves an awkward question: who pays the people who review the code that secures the network? Brink was founded in 2020 to answer part of it, with initial financial support from John Pfeffer and Wences Casares. It runs two programmes. A grants programme funds established protocol engineers full time, and a fellowship programme takes new contributors and mentors them for a year.
The legal position is stated openly, which is rarer in this space than it should be. Brink Technology, Inc is a 501(c)(3) organisation with EIN 85-2919136, and donations from United States taxpayers are deductible under IRC section 170. Brink says it is one hundred per cent funded by donations from the public and sponsorship from Bitcoin businesses, that its founding sponsors cover operational costs so that donations pass through to grantees in full, and it names Marathon, Tim Draper, Coinbase and Okcoin among its supporters alongside its two founding backers. Mike Schmidt is co-founder and Executive Director. The board is Schmidt plus two independent members, Jonathan Bier and Alex Leishman, and the grant committee is Schmidt plus Cory Fields and Niklas Gögge.
The grantee list is where the effect is legible. Michael Ford is funded for his work as a maintainer, on the build system, on security, and on cutting the number of dependencies in the codebase. Hennadii Stepanov maintains the Bitcoin Core GUI and translations. Sebastian Falbesoner, Martin Zumsande, Fabian Jahr and Stéphan Vuylsteke are funded largely for review and testing, which the project itself calls its bottleneck and which almost nothing else in the economy will pay for. Eugene Siegel and Marco De Leon work on fuzzing infrastructure, and the grantee conduition holds what Brink describes as its first grant focused on post-quantum research.
Brink also keeps a London office, and several grantees describe in-person collaboration there as the reason the arrangement works better than a wire transfer would.