Square Crypto is being generous this month; the firm awarded its 5th BTC developer grant in December alone. This time, the award went to Leon Johnson, a developer of Bitcoin-related technology in London.
Johnson stated that the grant is $100K and it will help fuel his work on Bitcoin key management thru a project named Photon. He stated that,
“The grant will support me as a developer over the next 12 months whilst I work on making Bitcoin key management easier and simpler, with a particular focus on demonstrating to wallet developers how to implement this new tool.”
He first got into Bitcoin in 2013; Johnson stated that he got involved as a developer in 2018 after taking Jimmy Song’s Programming Bitcoin course. Since then, he started “Advancing Bitcoin” a London technical conference for developers like him.
“I created this because as a new Bitcoin dev in 2018, there were no pure tech Bitcoin conferences,” he noted “and we need this to accelerate our learning and build personal connections with other Bitcoin developers.”
Square began awarding grants to open-source Bitcoin developers in September 2019 together with BTCPay Serve and has rolled out announcements in 2020.
The Twitter account of Square Crypto which announced the grant, said, “Leon will port some kind of ‘KeyBackup module’ from the ‘react-native library’ to Swift, which is a type of HTML for iPhones. Then he’s gonna connect that module to various iOS APIs to enable iCloud backups.”
“It also says here that he’s going to write documentation to simplify how developers integrate Photon into the software. All I can do is take his word here. What else? Well, he’s gonna ‘build a prototype to showcase how Photon works inside apps’ like we all love doing,” it continued. “Finally, Leon will devise a solution that implements Photon within multi-sig solutions like, uh, you know the ones.”
By the start of this month, Square Crypto announced a grant for Brink to fund a fellowship for Bitcoin Core Developer, Gloria Zhao, in cooperation with the Human Rights Foundation.
By the start of December, Square Crypto also awarded grants to bitcoin developers Justin Moon and Patricia Estevao, they also awarded a second annual grant to ZmnSCPxj, who received a grant from the company in December 2019.
The five developer grants for this month is a significant uptick from the past months; Square Crypto awarded only one grant in November and two in October.
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