Chaincode Labs was co-founded in 2014 by Alex Morcos and Suhas Daftuar, who had both
co-founded the trading firm Hudson River Trading in 2002. The premise was that Bitcoin
protocol work needed somewhere an engineer could do it full time, without a product
roadmap attached. The company is based in Midtown Manhattan, describes itself as privately
funded, and says it exists solely to support and develop Bitcoin. It publishes no legal
entity details, so structure here is Undocumented rather than assumed.
The output is mostly other people's names on commits. Chaincode says its engineers and researchers are free to pursue the open source projects they consider most important, and its team page reads as a roll call of Bitcoin Core and Lightning work: Pieter Wuille, who authored or co-authored sixteen Bitcoin Improvement Proposals; Russ Yanofsky, whose long-running effort to separate the node, wallet and GUI components has been merged in stages; Antoine Poinsot, who co-founded the security company Wizardsardine before joining; and Carla Kirk-Cohen, now Executive Director, who got her own start at the 2019 Chaincode Residency. The company also credits research and design contributions to cluster mempool, TRUC transactions and the consensus cleanup proposal.
The second half of the work is the pipeline. Chaincode ran in-person residencies that it says launched the careers of many engineers now working on Bitcoin open source software, and it has since produced programming challenges, a provable cryptography workshop, a book on Bitcoin development philosophy, and self-paced protocol seminars. It stewards the original BitDevs meetup in New York. Bitcoin Optech is listed among its past projects, and Alex Morcos is one of Optech's named founding sponsors. Brink's Director of Operations worked on Chaincode projects before moving there.
The thing Chaincode changed is less a piece of code than a norm: that a firm with money can fund protocol engineering without expecting to steer it.