Announcing Q4, 2025 Btrust Developer Grant Recipients
Africa, December 12, 2025 — We’re excited to recognize six outstanding Bitcoin open-source developers awarded Btrust grants, including four starter grant recipients and two open-source cohort members.
Starter Grants
The Btrust Starter Grant provides support for software engineers ready to contribute full-time to open-source Bitcoin development. It allows recipients to explore areas of interest, identify a focus for long-term contributions, and engage deeply with the global Bitcoin developer community with relevant support via mentorship and without financial constraints.
Starter Grant Recipients
Shammah Destiny Agwor
Shammah is a software engineer based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with over eight years of experience spanning backend engineering, application security, and Bitcoin open-source development.
A graduate of the 2025 Btrust Builders pathways, he brings a deep understanding of secure system design and protocol-level engineering to his work.
Professionally, Shammah has served as an application security engineer at Swan Bitcoin and currently works in a similar capacity at Bitnob, focusing on secure development practices, vulnerability remediation, and production hardening.
Outside his professional roles, he has also been an active bug bounty researcher on HackerOne and Bugcrowd, earning recognition for impactful security findings.
In the open-source ecosystem, Shammah contributes to Rust-Payjoin, a privacy-enhancing Bitcoin project designed to improve transaction privacy by disrupting the common input ownership heuristic.
His merged contributions include introducing metrics collection to the Payjoin directory service and implementing caching optimizations for OHTTP keys to improve performance and reliability.
With the Btrust Starter Grant, Shammah will dedicate himself full-time to advancing the Rust-Payjoin project.
His focus areas include expanding observability through comprehensive metrics for Payjoin v2 adoption, refactoring the Payjoin directory service using the Axum web framework for improved maintainability, and enhancing performance and security through key rotation and middleware improvements.
Beyond code contributions, Shammah will also initiate a bi-weekly Payjoin PR Review Club to facilitate onboarding and peer review within the community. His work aligns directly with Btrust’s mission to strengthen Bitcoin’s open-source privacy stack and build long-term sustainable contributors across the Global South.
Mohamed Emad
Mohamed is a software engineer based in Suez, Egypt, and a computer engineering student at Zagazig University.
With a focus on systems programming and low-level software architecture, he has been actively contributing to Bitcoin privacy and performance projects through Rust-based development.
A graduate of the Btrust Builders pathways, Mohamed combines academic excellence with practical open-source experience, bringing a deep technical perspective to modern Bitcoin infrastructure.
His track record includes a standout contribution during Google Summer of Code at Metacall, where he built MetaSSR, a server-side rendering framework in Rust that achieved a 560% performance improvement over Next.js in HTTP benchmarks.
He also completed a successful project through Summer of Bitcoin, implementing the Mill-IO event-loop library for Citadel-Tech, a key step toward improving Bitcoin privacy protocols like Coinswap through efficient event-driven designs.
Through the Btrust Starter Grant, Mohamed will dedicate himself full-time to advancing Bitcoin’s privacy and scalability by enhancing the Mill-IO event-loop and leading a major migration of Coinswap to an event-driven architecture.
His work will introduce Bitcoin-specific optimizations, high-performance networking components, and a production-ready RPC framework designed to make privacy transactions faster and more resource-efficient.
Beyond performance improvements, Mohamed will publish detailed benchmarks, RFC proposals, and technical guides to assist other developers building high-performance Bitcoin applications.
His initiative directly supports Bitcoin’s long-term privacy infrastructure by reducing core bottlenecks and empowering new contributors with reliable tools for scalable development.
Simon
Simon is a software engineer based in Nairobi, Kenya, with over six years of experience in Bitcoin protocol development, C++ systems programming, and distributed mining infrastructure.
He has a degree in Computer Science, and has become deeply engaged in the technical and educational pillars of Bitcoin development across Africa. He is the co‑founder of BitDevs Nairobi, a Btrust Builders faculty member, and a committed Bitcoin educator who has facilitated developer bootcamps both within and outside Kenya, helping nurture the next generation of open‑source contributors.
Technically, Simon’s work lies at the intersection of Bitcoin Core internals and mining decentralization. He has made significant contributions to sv2‑tp (Stratum V2 Template Provider) and sv2‑apps, the reference implementation of Stratum V2.
His merged pull requests include support for multi‑coinbase outputs enabling merge‑mining, enhanced startup logging for better diagnosability, and critical bug fixes addressing undefined behavior in coinbase validation. Several of these efforts have directly informed ongoing discussions around Bitcoin Core’s mining interfaces.
With the Btrust Starter Grant, Simon will dedicate the next couple of months full‑time to making the Stratum V2 Template Provider production‑ready. His priorities include strengthening Bitcoin Core compatibility across versions 30 and above, raising test coverage to beyond 80 percent through exhaustive fuzzing, implementing advanced observability and security tooling, and supporting the first mining pools deploying the open Stratum V2 implementation.
Simon’s combined focus on technical rigor and community mentorship reflects Btrust’s mission to decentralize development and empower builders in the Global South. Through his work, thousands of miners will regain transaction‑selection power, advancing Bitcoin’s censorship resistance and reinforcing its decentralized future.
Ifeanyichukwu Amajuoyi
Ifeanyichukwu is a software engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria, with a background in mechanical engineering and over seven years of experience building scalable, high‑impact software systems.
A graduate of the 2024 Btrust Builders fellowship, he has since become a consistent open‑source contributor within the Lightning Development Kit (LDK) ecosystem, making meaningful contributions across rust‑lightning, ldk‑node, and ldk‑server.
His work spans code contributions, documentation improvements, issue triaging, and reviews, touching critical areas like payment routing, wallet operations, and protocol reliability.
Ifeanyi’s merged pull requests include improving fuzz corpus management for CI, fixing duplicate HTLC fail‑backs, and clarifying nuanced payment forwarding configurations.
His growing expertise in LDK architecture has also made him a frequent collaborator with project maintainers and an emerging mentor within the Builders community.
With the Btrust Starter Grant, Ifeanyichukwu will dedicate himself full‑time to advancing LDK Server, a foundational service for running large‑scale Lightning Service Providers (LSPs).
His primary objectives include implementing a unified logging system, developing a complete observability stack with telemetry and metrics, introducing PostgreSQL support for high‑availability deployments, and enhancing the BOLT 12 API feature set. These upgrades will help move LDK Server closer to production‑readiness and unlock adoption for advanced Lightning applications.
Beyond his technical focus, Ifeanyi remains active in the wider Bitcoin developer ecosystem, collaborating with maintainers, exchanging feedback in LDK PRs, and mentoring aspiring contributors through Btrust‑affiliated initiatives.
His planned work directly supports Btrust’s mission by strengthening open, reliable Lightning infrastructure and expanding the pool of experienced Bitcoin protocol engineers in the Global South.
Long Term Grants
The Btrust Open-Source Cohort offers long-term support to established Bitcoin open-source contributors, promoting a collaborative environment for sustained development.
Members receive funding paid monthly in Bitcoin, mentorship, and peer support to deepen their work on critical Bitcoin open-source projects.
The cohort model aims to build a resilient, inclusive developer ecosystem, enabling contributors from the Global South to make meaningful, lasting impacts on Bitcoin's open-source ecosystem.
Long Term Grant Recipients
Abdullahi Yunus
Abdullahi is a Bitcoin and Lightning Network developer from Nigeria whose work focuses on strengthening the reliability, interoperability, and feature completeness of Lightning implementations.
A graduate of the Btrust Builders program and a former Starter Grant recipient, he has become a key contributor to both Lightning Network Daemon (LND) and Lightning Polar, where his ongoing commits and in‑depth code reviews have significantly improved the ecosystem’s developer experience.
Over the past year under the Btrust Starter Grant, Abdullahi contributed critical improvements to the LND codebase, including features like channel‑backup archiving, CI stabilization, and advanced path‑finding enhancements, while also expanding Polar with SimLN and BTCD integration for better testing infrastructure. His active reviews across multiple repositories have helped maintain project stability and accelerate new feature readiness.
With this Btrust Long‑Term Grant, Abdullahi will deepen his work on the Onion Messaging (BOLT 4) implementation and downstream BOLT 12 Offers features in LND, key developments that enable private, invoice‑less payments and richer application‑level interactions over the Lightning Network.
His upcoming milestones include finalizing the forwarding infrastructure for onion messages, resolving long‑standing stability issues such as zombie‑channel pruning, introducing payment garbage‑collection mechanisms, and implementing pathfinding logic specific to onion‑message routes.
Beyond LND, Abdullahi will continue advancing Lightning Polar, adding a built‑in block‑explorer feature, integrating the latest node implementations, and ensuring interoperability in developer test networks. His planned collaboration with Lightning Labs engineers will help guide these features toward production‑quality releases.
Abdullahi’s long‑term focus on Onion Messaging, BOLT 12 Offers, and Polar tooling directly supports Btrust’s mission to foster open, decentralized, and privacy‑preserving Bitcoin infrastructure through sustained contributions from the Global South.
Sulaiman Aminu Barkindo
Sulaiman is a software engineer from Nigeria with over six years of professional experience and a dedicated contributor to Bitcoin open‑source infrastructure.
A former Btrust Starter Grant recipient, Sulaiman has become an integral part of the Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) project, contributing major advancements that have brought the software closer to mainnet‑readiness.
During his starter‑grant period, Sulaiman’s technical milestones included developing mainnet‑safe monitoring features through HTLC tracking, expanding disaster‑recovery capabilities to cover full‑channel and HTLC fund retrieval, and diagnosing a critical LDK integration bug that restored signing correctness during unilateral closes. His extensive code reviews and testing contributions have strengthened enforcement logic consistency throughout the VLS codebase.
With the Btrust Long‑Term Grant, Sulaiman will dedicate a full year to completing the final components required for VLS mainnet readiness and enterprise stability.
His focus includes strengthening signer state‑machine correctness, ensuring that channel state only advances after on‑chain confirmations, improving persistence atomicity across tracker and node systems, and extending fuzz‑testing coverage throughout signer operations.
He will also enhance dependency security and auditability, upgrade KeysManager entropy handling, and implement key Lightning protocol extensions such as dual funding and splicing support.
Beyond protocol work, Sulaiman will contribute to enterprise‑scale validation, testing signer performance under production‑grade conditions and exploring secure enclave deployments for hardened environments.
His systematic approach, combining testing infrastructure, dependency governance, and performance optimization, ensures VLS’s evolution into a robust, auditable, production‑ready signer for Lightning applications.
Sulaiman’s continued leadership on VLS further anchors Btrust’s goal of advancing open‑source, non‑custodial Bitcoin infrastructure from the Global South, providing the security foundation needed for truly decentralized custody at enterprise scale.
Btrust Builders Alumni
Five out of six recipients of this quarter’s grants are graduates of the Btrust Builders program. The structured learning tracks they completed provided a strong foundation in Bitcoin fundamentals, hands‑on open‑source experience, and sustained mentorship from seasoned contributors.
Their progression from Builders graduates to funded grantees reflects the program’s mission to cultivate high‑potential developers across the Global South and prepare them for long‑term, sustainable careers in Bitcoin open source. Each grantee’s journey underscores what focused guidance, community collaboration, and opportunity can achieve when paired with dedication and talent.
Btrust Builders is partnering with Chaincode Labs for the 2026 ₿OSS (Bitcoin Open‑Source Software) Challenge, a structured, hands‑on program designed to help developers take their first steps into Bitcoin open‑source contribution under the guidance of experienced mentors. Learn more about the partnership and program here.
Interested in following a similar path as our Q4 recipients? Apply to join the 2026 ₿OSS Challenge cohort and become part of the next generation of Bitcoin open‑source developers. Applications are ongoing and will close on the 31st of this month.
Explore other Btrust Builders pathways here.
Applications for Btrust Developer Grants
Btrust developer grant applications are open year-round, with new recipients announced quarterly. If you’re a developer passionate about contributing to Bitcoin open-source development, we encourage you to apply.
Learn more about our grant programs and apply through our website.
Stay updated on our initiatives and future opportunities by following us on X, Nostr, Instagram and LinkedIn.
About Us
Btrust is a non-profit organization with a dedicated mission to decentralize the development of Bitcoin Open-Source Software. Our focus is on fostering developer talent in the Global South and supporting the free and open-source Bitcoin ecosystem.
