Announcing Our Third Grant: Leonardo Lima, Fedimint, and BDK
We are thrilled to announce Leonardo Lima as our third grant recipient at Vinteum. A talented Software Engineer and dedicated Bitcoin advocate based in Brazil, Leonardo started his career in a real-estate tech startup in Brazil, building back-end systems, focused on financial products, payments, fund transfer, and accounting tools. He later transitioned to a role at Bipa, a Bitcoin startup.
Contributions to Bitcoin and FOSS
Leonardo’s commitment to the Bitcoin and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) community is evident from his active contributions since early 2022. His work includes collaborating on a real-time stream of block events library, leveraging the mempool.space API for the Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK). This work was part of his internship with Lloyd Fournier during the Summer of Bitcoin (SoB) program.
Leonardo discovered the SoB program through Vinteum and subsequently started attending São Paulo Bitdevs, where he interacted with other Bitcoin developers, including our first two grantees, Bruno and Davidson.
Involvement in Fedimint and SoB’23
In 2023, Leonardo participated in the SoB program for a second time, focusing on the Fedimint project under the mentorship of Eric Sirion. His focus has been on integrating Tor support at the client level, enhancing privacy and security in interactions between clients and federation servers.
The Grant Period: Focus and Goals
Leonardo’s grant period will be dedicated to significant contributions to both Fedimint and BDK. His goals include:
Fedimint: Enhancing Client & Server Tor Support, developing a MultiSig Co-Signing Module, and exploring the potential of a PassKeys Module.
BDK: Adding native Tor support to rust-esplora-client and rust-electrum-client, along with contributing to other projects like rust-cktap and rust-bitcoin.
(You can learn about his plans in detail by reading his proposal)
Leonardo’s commitment to building and contributing to sovereign and freedom tech ecosystems is noteworthy. Alongside the projects mentioned above, Leonardo kickstarted 2024 by traveling to Madeira to participate in Cohort #1 of Sovereign Engineering. This two-month program, organized by Pablof7z, Gigi, and André Loja, is focused on hacking and mentorship.
We at Vinteum are excited to support Leonardo in his endeavors and are confident that his ongoing work continues to make valuable contributions to the Bitcoin community. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our donors, whose support makes these grants possible.
Stay tuned for updates on Leonardo’s progress and learn more about how Vinteum is fostering innovation in the Bitcoin space by following us on X or Nostr.
