Mike Schmidt joined the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2018 as a product manager at Blockstream and a contributor to Bitcoin Optech. At Optech he writes for the newsletter and organises and presents technical content at member workshops, work he described as the blocking and tackling needed to get innovations from the open source pipeline into wallets, exchanges and businesses.
He has also contributed to Bitcoin Core by organising events, helping run the taproot review sessions, and doing testing and outreach.
He is co-founder and Executive Director of Brink, which was founded in 2020 to fund Bitcoin protocol engineers through grants and to mentor new contributors through a fellowship. He serves on Brink's board alongside two independent directors, and on the grant committee alongside Cory Fields and Niklas Gögge. Brink states that its operational costs are covered by its founding sponsors so that public donations pass through to grantees in full.