Builders Beyond the Program: What Btrust Builders Alumni Are Working On Today (Part 1)
For many developers, Btrust Builders is where their open-source journey begins. Through technical education, mentorship, and hands-on learning, participants develop the skills needed to contribute to Bitcoin. What happens next is often just as interesting.
Today, Builders alumni can be found across different parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Some are contributing directly to Bitcoin Core. Others are maintaining wallet infrastructure, researching Lightning Network challenges, improving merchant tools, or helping businesses integrate Bitcoin payments. Their work is often technical, sometimes invisible to end users, and almost always collaborative.
This is the first in a two-part series highlighting Btrust Builders alumni who have gone on to receive grants and continue contributing to Bitcoin open source. In this edition, we look at five developers and the work they are focused on today.
Naiyoma Aurelia
This year, Naiyoma Aurelia took the stage at bitcoin++ open source edition in Nairobi to share lessons from her work as a Bitcoin Core contributor. For many people in the audience, she represented a growing number of African developers making meaningful contributions to one of Bitcoin's most critical projects.
A 2024 Btrust Builders fellow, Naiyoma is Africa's first female Bitcoin Core contributor. Since completing the program, she has continued contributing to Bitcoin Core with support from HRF and OpenSats. Her work includes reviewing pull requests, and contributing improvements to the codebase that powers the Bitcoin network.
More recently, she has focused on node privacy and the ways Bitcoin nodes can be identified across different networks. This area of research looks at how observers might track or fingerprint nodes and what can be done to reduce those risks. While the work often happens behind the scenes, it contributes to making Bitcoin more resistant to surveillance and strengthens privacy for people running nodes around the world.
Like many open-source contributors, much of Naiyoma's impact is measured not by features users can immediately see, but by the long-term improvements she helps bring to the network's reliability and privacy.
Abubakar Sadiq Ismail
Most Bitcoin users never think about how their wallet decides what transaction fee to recommend, but behind that seemingly simple experience is a complex system that helps determine how transactions move through the network and eventually get confirmed. It is a problem that becomes even more important during periods of high activity, when competition for block space increases.
Abubakar Sadiq Ismail has spent years working in this area. A Btrust Builders 2023 alumnus and active Btrust grantee, he contributes to Bitcoin Core with a focus on fee estimation and mempool infrastructure. His work involves improving the systems that help wallets estimate transaction fees and manage the flow of transactions waiting to be confirmed.
Although much of this work happens deep within Bitcoin's infrastructure, its effects are felt by everyday users. Better fee estimation can help users avoid overpaying for transactions while improving the overall efficiency of how transactions move through the network.
As Bitcoin continues to grow, contributors like Abubakar are helping ensure that the software evolves alongside the demands placed on it.
Enigbe Ochekliye
The Lightning Network has made instant Bitcoin payments possible however, managing liquidity across that network remains one of its most difficult challenges.
For Enigbe Ochekliye, understanding and improving that challenge has become a major focus of her work.
She was a member of the Btrust Builders Genesis Cohort and a Btrust grantee, also has contributed extensively to the Lightning Dev Kit ecosystem through code contributions, technical reviews, and research. Her work has included improvements to logging infrastructure, chain synchronization features, and the reliability of different LDK components.
Today, she is researching distributed control systems for Lightning Network liquidity management. In simple terms, she is exploring how liquidity can be coordinated more effectively across the network while preserving the decentralized nature that makes Lightning valuable in the first place.
It is the kind of work that sits at the intersection of engineering and research. While answers may not arrive overnight, the questions being explored today could influence how Lightning infrastructure develops in the years ahead.
Peter Tyonum
Open-source development depends on more than the people building applications. It also depends on the people maintaining the tools that make those applications possible.
Peter Tyonum is one of those people. As a member of the Btrust Builders Genesis Cohort, Peter has become a maintainer within the Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK) ecosystem. He has contributed extensively to bdk-cli and related wallet infrastructure libraries, helping maintain tools used by developers building Bitcoin wallets and applications.
Infrastructure work rarely attracts the same attention as consumer-facing products, yet it plays a critical role in the health of an ecosystem. Developers rely on these libraries to build reliable software, and maintaining them requires ongoing testing, reviews, improvements, and support.
Peter's work reflects an important part of open-source development: ensuring that the foundation remains strong enough for others to continue building on top of it.
Tobechi Chukwuleta
If you've spent time around the Bitcoin developer community in Lagos, there's a good chance you've come across Tobechi Chukwuleta. As both a contributor and community builder, he has spent years helping expand access to Bitcoin open-source development while contributing to projects that support real-world Bitcoin use.
A 2023 Btrust Builders fellow, Tobechi is an active BTCPay Server contributor and the lead organizer of BitDevs Lagos. His work includes contributions to major projects such as the Shopify Plugin V2, the Satoshi Tickets event plugin, and the Mavapay Naira Checkout integration. Together, these projects have helped expand BTCPay Server's usefulness for merchants and businesses looking to integrate Bitcoin payments.
Alongside his technical contributions, Tobechi has invested significant time in mentorship and community building. Through BitDevs Lagos and other initiatives, he has helped support developers who have gone on to become contributors within the Bitcoin ecosystem themselves.
His work demonstrates that growing an ecosystem is not only about writing code. It is also about creating opportunities for others to learn, contribute, and build.
Looking Ahead
The five alumni featured here are working on very different parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Some are contributing directly to Bitcoin Core. Others are researching Lightning infrastructure, maintaining wallet tooling, or helping businesses adopt Bitcoin through open-source software.
What connects them is a commitment to continued contribution. Long after completing the Builders program, they remain active participants in the open-source projects and communities that shape Bitcoin's future.
In part two of this series, we'll highlight more Btrust Builders alumni who are contributing through product development, education, community leadership, and open-source engineering across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
