Announcing our second grant: Davidson Souza and the Utreexo project
Just 3 months ago, we announced the Vinteum organization dedicated to supporting and educating the growing community of Brazilian Bitcoin-curious technologists. In that initial post, we announced our first grantee and opened applications for our very first official Bitcoin and Lightning Seminars cohort.
Bruno, our first grantee and Director of Education, has committed a lot of time to reviewing pull requests in Bitcoin Core, improving the test coverage, and writing new features. That work was recently recognized in a report by Bitmex Research with Vinteum being amongst the leading organizations funding the top 30 Bitcoin Core reviewers. In addition to those invaluable contributions, Bruno will also be mentoring the 25 people that were selected (from a pool of 100+ applicants) to attend our inaugural official seminars.
Despite those exciting developments for Vinteum and Bruno, this blog post is actually focused on our newest grantee, Davidson Souza.
Davidson’s initial foray into the Bitcoin development space came in the form of attending some of our unofficial seminars, more than a year ago when Vinteum was still just an idea. We’re incredibly proud that our second grantee comes from the initial seeds of the organization. Since participating in those seminars, he has been an active participant in the local BitDevs São Paulo. Davidson was also an intern in the Summer of Bitcoin program, where he was mentored by Calvin Kim, a Bitmex grantee, to port the Go Utreexo library to Rust so that one can validate Utreexo proofs with Rust code.
As part of Vinteum’s grant, we’re lucky to have Calvin continuing his mentorship as Davidson progresses with his work on Utreexo. According to Calvin, “Davidson has been a strong performer during the Summer of Bitcoin program, demonstrating his knowledge of Bitcoin at the protocol level, and has been productive in grasping and implementing the Utreexo algorithms.”
Bruno is also mentoring Davidson as relates to general software engineering and working in open source.
Utreexo is a hash accumulator for Bitcoin, proposed by Tadge Dryja, the co-author of the Lightning Network paper. It is a proposed alternative to levelDB, which is the database used to represent the UTXO set in Bitcoin Core. That will allow full nodes to obtain and verify information about the UTXOs being spent in a transaction. It has enormous scalability benefits as it decreases the amount of storage full nodes need without changing Bitcoin’s security model. It could make running a node way cheaper, speed-up Initial Block Download, and even be used as a UTXO set oracle for projects like the Validating Lightning Signer.
Davidson is currently implementing wallet capabilities to the Rust Utreexo library so that he can integrate Utreexo into the Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK). His plans also include writing BIPs for it, working on the interaction with the P2P protocol, as well as contributing to other projects, like Rust Bitcoin.
We’re again very grateful to all the donors that make Vinteum’s work possible. If you want to donate to Vinteum, go to our website or e-mail us at info@vinteum.org.
