The cohort includes the first Btrust open source grant beneficiary and marks the initiation of Btrust’s unique approach to responsibly introducing newcomers to the Bitcoin open source ecosystem.

As of August, 2024, the Africa Open Source Cohort is now known as the Btrust Open Source Cohort.

WEST AFRICA, July 21, 2022 ─ Today we are proud to announce the Btrust Africa Open Source Cohort and welcome its founding member Vladimir Fomene. The Open Source Cohort is Btrust’s first step in achieving its goal to locate, educate and remunerate Bitcoin developers in the global south. Through it, Btrust will fund and support developers looking to contribute to Bitcoin free and open source software.

Btrust was initially announced in February 2021 by Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z in a tweet where they donated 500 BTC to fund Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India. In December 2021, the inaugural board was announced and has been working since then to realise the original vision. Today this vision has become a reality.

Introducing Vladimir

Vladimir is a software engineer from Cameroon who previously worked as a full stack engineer. He discovered Bitcoin development through the Qala Africa developer program, where he had the opportunity to learn about and build on Bitcoin. He is drawn to Bitcoin’s ability to reduce the economic power held by governments and the possibility of frictionless global payments.

During his time with the Btrust Africa Open Source Cohort, Vladimir intends to focus on custody solutions that empower African bitcoin holders to easily custody their own coins. Initially, his main focus will be on the Bitcoin Development Kit, which provides developers with the building blocks to easily produce cross-platform, customised bitcoin wallets. He will also contribute to locally relevant projects such as the Swahili Wordlist Project, which will provide millions of potential Bitcoin users with BIP39 seed words in their mother tongue.

Responsibly Scaling

Open source communities are delicate ecosystems with scarce resources for review, testing and project maintenance. This makes it particularly challenging to onboard newcomers who often require additional help from resource-constrained contributors and maintainers. Without carefully navigating the norms of a project, it’s easy for new developers to unintentionally harm more than they help in their first months of contribution.

Btrust exists to geographically decentralise the development of free and open source Bitcoin software. Our focus on countries with fewer Bitcoin developers means that we will be supporting newer entrants to the open source community. This responsibility presents the usual challenges associated with onboarding new developers to open source development, and introduces the cultural challenge of bringing on developers from previously untapped and underrepresented parts of the world.

Cohort Structure

The Btrust Africa Open Source Cohort will enrich the existing grant model with additional structure to make it more suitable for newcomers to Bitcoin open source development. Btrust will iterate on this model as we learn but will begin with the following structure:

• Mentorship: Each developer in the cohort will be paired with a technical mentor at their project of interest who will help them navigate its norms and become familiar with its codebase.
• Management: As is standard in engineering environments, cohort members will be supported by a manager who is responsible for professional development and personal support.
• Peer Support: Although cohort members are free to work on separate projects, they will operate as an engineering team with daily standups and events to build a sense of belonging and community within the cohort.
• Project Relations: Btrust will actively communicate with the projects that cohort members choose to work on to ensure that members of the cohort are positively impacting the project.
• Long Term: To encourage long term thinking and projects, new cohort members will be contracted for a year with the option to renew for a second year on mutual agreement. Renewal terms after a successful two year term will scale with time spent in the cohort.
• Additional Support: Btrust will provide the additional support to ensure that cohort members can focus on efficient contributions to Bitcoin open source projects. This support will include stipends for hardware suitable for Bitcoin development and travel support to connect with the developer community at conferences.

Community Focused

Contributing to open source projects through review, repository maintenance, mentorship and other so-called “unglamorous” contributions are the foundation of a successful project. Participation in these activities will be one of the factors that determine cohort members’ compensation to incentivise taking on work of this nature. There are already countless developers in the Bitcoin space who embody this community-minded approach to open source development, and their example inspires us to instil these values in members of the cohort.

On the Shoulders of Giants

This hybrid approach to grant giving is inspired by other programs in the Bitcoin developer pipeline. Projects that focus on newer talent like Summer of Bitcoin and Qala Africa and more structured approaches to onboarding such as the Chaincode Labs Residency and Brink Fellowship have inspired the structure of our open source cohort. We are thankful to the organisers of these programs for their work to support Bitcoin development and the inspiration we have gained from them.

In the spirit of open source, we will be documenting the operations of the open source cohort and sharing any resources we collect. Our hope is that other organisations looking to make similar strides may find this useful in replicating and thus decentralising this model.

Next Steps for Btrust

We look forward to growing our open source cohort and introducing productive newcomers to the bitcoin open source community. When Btrust has completed the process of incorporating an entity and fully taken custody of its funds, we will open applications for 2–3 more African developers to join the cohort and longer term, look to replicate the model across the global south.

Additional information / Related Links

Btrust website: https://btrust.tech

Btrust Genesis Principles: https://github.com/btrustteam/board-book/blob/main/vision/genesis_principles.md

Btrust twitter: @btrustteam

Media contact information

For all enquiries, please email info@btrust.tech