The fund said it had given more than $500 million to projects such as the Calyx Institute, the Signal Technology Foundation, and the Tor Project.
The CEO of Block, Jack Dorsey, and his Start Small funding group have given $5 million to Brink, a nonprofit that helps Bitcoin developers.
In a tweet on June 14, Brink said that Dorsey and Start Small had promised to donate $1 million each year for the next five years as part of their “developer funding efforts.” Before he left his job as CEO of Twitter in April 2020, Dorsey set up the fund to fight the COVID-19 outbreak. At the time, the CEO of Twitter said that he had put $1 billion into the fund.
At the time of publication, Start Small’s website said that the fund had more than $1.4 billion in it, and more than $500 million had been given to projects like the Tor Project, which is the nonprofit behind the anonymous Tor Browser, the Signal Technology Foundation, which supports the Signal messaging app, and the Calyx Institute, which is a platform for teaching people about digital privacy.
Brink was started in 2020 and offers grants and fellowships to help open-source Bitcoin coders and engineers. Aside from crypto fans like Dorsey, digital asset companies like Nexo have also given money to the group in the past to help BTC developers.
Crypto and blockchain corporations have started funds to attract developers. In December 2022, Dogecoin launched a $360,000 core developer fund, and metaverse developer Animoca Brands announced a billion-dollar startup fund.
