Photo credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Maelstrom, an early-stage investment fund run by the family office of BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, has launched a grant program of up to $250,000 per applicant for the technical development of the Bitcoin network.

The Bitcoin Grant Program aims to help enhance Bitcoin’s resilience, scalability, censorship resistance, and privacy, according to the venture capital firm’s website.

“Bitcoin is the bedrock asset in the crypto space, and unlike other crypto projects, Bitcoin never conducted an offering to raise funds for its technical development […] We are therefore keen to give back and donate to the Bitcoin technology, on which the crypto ecosystem depends.”

The program will award grants of $50,000 to $150,000 per developer, with a maximum of $250,000 per year for those receiving multiple grants.

The grants will be paid monthly in Bitcoin (BTC), USD Coin (USDC), or Tether (USDT) over a 12-month period and are intended to fund contributions to the network’s open-source codebase, such as pull requests and code reviews.

The application window is open until August 25, and successful candidates can expect to receive grants in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Grant recipients will be chosen by a review committee consisting of Hayes, who also serves as Maelstrom’s chief investment officer, and Jonathan Bier, the grant program’s administrator and CIO at investment manager Farside Investors.

Since Bitcoin’s inception, several innovations have emerged to address the network’s challenges and expand its capabilities. The introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) in 2017 paved the way for scaling solutions like the Lightning Network, launched in 2018, which enables faster and cheaper transactions off-chain.

The 2021 Taproot upgrade improved Bitcoin’s privacy and smart contract capabilities, while the more recent Bitcoin Ordinals protocol unlocked the ability to create NFTs on the blockchain. Additionally, Bitcoin Runes, a new token standard, aims to enhance fungibility for assets on the network.

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