HDR Global Trading Ltd, the parent company of leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchange, BitMEX, has introduced a developer grant program that will complement its previous efforts and contributions that support software architects working on open-source protocols.
HDR Global has previously awarded a “no strings attached” $100,000 grant to Michael Ford, a Bitcoin (BTC) Core developer.
The company noted:
“Under this program, we hope to add to those grants we have previously made to relevant developers by providing annual Open Source Developer Grants to developers working on Bitcoin, NodeJS, Java or Kubernetes. In addition we may provide certain smaller grants, from time to time, related to the production of related educational materials, technical workshops or the transcribing or translation of relevant technical content.”
As mentioned in the announcement, HDR has awarded a total of $650,000 in grants for open-source projects (to date). This amount reportedly includes a $150,000 grant to Ford and half a million dollars to the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT.
HDR said it will be taking grant applications from May 1 to June 30, 2020, and that offers will be made from July to September of this year.
In late March 2020, BitMEX, a Seychelles-registered and Hong Kong-operated crypto derivatives trading platform, published an extensive blog post explaining who’s actually funding Bitcoin (BTC) development.
As noted in the post, Blockstream and Lightning Labs “employ the largest number of developers working on open-source Bitcoin or Lightning related projects.”
BitMEX itself, Bitfinex, Bitmain, BitPay, and OKCoin are some of the other crypto firms financing ongoing BTC development.
On April 20, 2020, BitMEX confirmed that it had issued grants of between $300,000 and $1 million, as a response to COVID-19 relief efforts.
The exchanges’ grants reportedly totaled $2.5 million, and were given to four organizations:
- Gates Philanthropy Partners
- Nuclear Threat Initiative (Biosecurity Program)
- OpenMined
- Our World in Data