Who is financing the development of Bitcoin Core

It's no secret that it is much easier to attract financing for a centralized project than fordecentralized. And Bitcoin was no exception.

When creating Bitcoin, Satoshi did not ask for compensationand did not even use the BTC that he received as a result of his work on the network. Due to a combination of the need for funding, following Satoshi's example and his passion for the project, many developers continue to work on the code, but now for a fee. Dozens of companies are ready to invest in technology that may take the place of the traditional financial system in the future.

Below is a list of the main organizations and individualsfinancing the development of Bitcoin and Lightning. Based on data provided by BitMex, Blockstream and Lightning Labs are the largest contributors to open source development in the space, while Chaincode Labs is currently the largest contributor to development. Thus, over the past five years, the situation has changed significantly both in terms of the availability of finance and the transparency of its distribution among network participants.

We propose to consider a diagram and table that give the most complete picture of the financing of the developers of the first cryptocurrency, not taking into account private donations and contributions to the development of Bitcoin.

According to the table below,Several dozen developers are working on the development of the Bitcoin blockchain and related technologies, whose work is paid by organizations independent from each other.

As we can see, at the moment the clear leader inThe Bitcoin Core team's funding arm is Chaincode Labs, while a dozen companies are trying to contribute to the development of the ecosystem. And there is nothing wrong with this, since financing has become more transparent than during the reign of the network’s single sponsor – Bitcoin Foundation. In this way, the space has been able to better secure partnerships between developers receiving funding from independent sources.