kaspersky

Open source funding is a challenging thing in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is why well placed grants can make a huge difference. This is something that the Square Crypto initiative knows and how it decided to give a grant to one talented developer.

As the crypto news show, the developer who is working full time on the Lighting Network (a proposed second layer scaling solution for Bitcoin) has been awarded with a grant and the team welcomed him and his pseudonymous ‘ZmnSDPxj’ nickname into the fold on December 11th.

The actual identity behind the ‘ZmnSDPxj’ nick was not relevant for receiving the grant. In fact, Square Crypto gives a grant but still knows nothing about the person besides the fact that he or she lives somewhere in Asia.

However, the important thing is that Square Crypto has acknowledged the quality of the work in the Lighting ecosystem and went on to explain it in their announcement, stating:

“ZmnSCPxj has been a part-time contributor to Lightning and C-Lightning for two years. With this grant, he’ll be able to leave behind his day job of 14 years and go full-time on Lightning and bitcoin. This is the first financial support he’s received for his bitcoin work … ZmnSCPxj is well-known for his prolific posts on lightning-dev email lists, ability to analyze and respond to proposals in excruciating detail, and doing both while generating comprehensive proposals of his own.”

This grant is another tangible step in the direction of helping the fledging Lighting Network mature. In that manner,  ‘ZmnSCPxj’ will now be able to devote the entirety of their professional focus to contributing to the improvement of the experimental scaling tech.

In a move that could never happen in any other space, we’re supplying a grant to what looks at first glance like a hash function. Please welcome ZmnSCPxj to the small but growing family of Square Crypto grant recipients.

— Spiral (@spiral_xyz) December 11, 2019

The grant to ‘ZmnSCPxj’ comes a few months after the Square Crypto team doled out $100,000 in a grant to the BTCPay Foundation, a non-profit organization backing the BTCPay Server project which has recently become something of a darling in the BTC community offering a permissionless Bitcoin payment rail.

Square Crypto gives grants and remains a team that is lean, independent and fully open-source. Ran by the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the team is determined to shine in the future. As Dorsey stated before:

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency … I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.”