After Square, Coinbase Will Now Fund Bitcoin Development With a New Grants Program

In hopes of regaining the support of the cryptocurrency community after the ‘apolitical’ stunt, Coinbase has decided to fund ‘at-least’ two Bitcoin Core developers. This sponsorship act marks the debut for Crypto Community Fund, the exchange’s new grants program.

Coinbase Shows Support For Bitcoin Development

In a blog article released yesterday, Manish Gupta, EVP of Engineering at Coinbase, announced plans to sponsor at-least ‘two Bitcoin developers who contribute directly to the Bitcoin Core codebase or closely associated Bitcoin projects.’ As of writing, the change has started accepting applications.

This comes after Coinbase faced a lot of heat for proclaiming it’s ‘apolitical company mission’ that led to the departure of 60 employees. Coinbase said that it intends to ‘support developers who are committed to growing and maintaining the Bitcoin ecosystem.’

The current funding is to support Bitcoin’s development. But Gupta said that the crypto grants program is open to sponsoring ‘other types of projects and crypto communities.’

We believe helping to connect and grow the cryptoeconomy is essential to building an open financial system for the world. Our Crypto Community Fund aims to grow and improve the entire crypto industry, while making it simpler to use and more secure for everyone. If successful, we intend to expand the program to other types of projects and crypto communities.

Coinbase has invited folks willing to nominate Bitcoin devs requiring sponsorship to provide their details. The San Francisco-based crypto exchange will make the final funding call after shortlisting ‘by current Bitcoin Core developers and important community members.’

Lots in the community, including Twitter and Square boss Jack Dorsey, applauded the move. However, this is not the first Bitcoin development funding effort. And as for Coinbase, which is one of the earliest crypto exchanges to have started operating, this is coming pretty late.

Not The First Bitcoin Development Grant

Jack Dorsey’s payments company Square, which was recently in the news for its $50 million BTC purchase, had also made headlines earlier this year for supporting two more Bitcoin Core developers.

The company has been funding to ‘free up developers to work on bitcoin in their own way’ since December last year. BTCPay and ZmnSCPxj were the first set of recipients. On March 4, Square awarded the grant to Jon Atack and Tankred Hase.

Also, apart from the supporting Bitcoin Core contribution, Square has actively participated in the improvement of the Lightning Network. In January, the company announced its plans to build a Lightning Development Kit. As per the announcement released then:

LDK will include an API, language bindings, demo apps, and anything else that makes integrating Lightning easy, safe, and configurable. The API is based on the Rust-Lightning project, which offers clean interfaces and minimal system dependencies. Rust is also among the safest systems languages, one that will attract developers who can sustain LDK independently of us.

But frankly, the increased inclination of significantly affluent companies to support the growth of the existing Bitcoin infrastructure is laudatory. This is essentially what needs to happen, apart from the financial growth, of course.