Announcing Vinteum: Supporting Bitcoin Development in Brazil
We are thrilled to announce the launch of Vinteum, a non-profit Bitcoin research and development center dedicated to supporting Bitcoin developers in Brazil and the wider Latin America region. We will train and fund open source developers to work on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Our aim is to foster the next generation of Bitcoin builders.
Protecting Bitcoin
Bitcoin is, of course, a lot of things: censorship-resistant money, a freedom tool, a long-term safe haven asset, and more. But it is, first and foremost, an open source software and a decentralized protocol with no owners and no leadership.
This means there is no official team and no built-in mechanism for funding Bitcoin developers. Bitcoin needs developers to keep scaling, maintain its security, improve its privacy, and increase its programmability. That’s why we, as a community, need to create various ways to fund developers so they can work full-time on Bitcoin, the Lightning Network, or other important open source projects in the Bitcoin space.
During the first few years after Satoshi created Bitcoin, developers worked on it for free in their spare time. Nowadays, we have more full-time developers dedicated to Bitcoin, thanks to a decentralized effort from the community and businesses built on top of Bitcoin. In order to increase the value of their investments or protect the key properties mentioned above, bitcoin hodlers have shown a proclivity for giving back to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Why Vinteum Is Needed
The development funding space has matured a lot during the past few years. Exchanges like Okcoin, Bitmex, Gemini, and others give grants to open source developers. Moreover, companies employ developers to work in Bitcoin’s infrastructure, such as Lightning Labs, Blockstream, Acinq, and NYDIG. Lastly, there are contributions and grants from foundations like Brink, OpenSats, MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, Spiral, ₿trust, and the Human Rights Foundation.
So why do we need another foundation?
On an episode of Stephan Livera’s podcast, Steve Lee or Spiral said this:
I think the right way for open source development funding and organization is a 10 by 10 model. 10 organizations of 10 people, where each organization is independent. Independent funding, independent leadership… other projects might have more of a 1 by 100 model, where it’s just a centralized entity that has a huge budget, and I think that’s the antithesis of Bitcoin and how it should be done.
We couldn’t agree more.
No single entity should fund Bitcoin development or decide who gets funded. And we believe organizations with different focus areas and specializations will pop up.
Vinteum will focus on building and growing the Bitcoin development ecosystem in Brazil and the wider Latin America region. We believe Bitcoin development needs diversity. We need input from devs around the globe if we are going to build global money.
Big Focus On Education
We need talent. Bitcoin development funding has improved, but we still face lots of challenges, especially with regard to building a robust recruiting pipeline. That’s why it is important that we not only fund developers but also develop programs and educational efforts to teach developers about Bitcoin and onboard them into Bitcoin development.
We’ll certainly work with and borrow from the learnings from other programs that were started in the past two years, like Summer of Bitcoin, Qala, Torogoz, and Librería de Satoshi.
The first thing we’ll do is adapt Chaincode Labs Seminar’s curriculum and start cohorts in Portuguese so Brazilian developers can interact with each other and learn in groups. If you’re a developer interested in learning more about how Bitcoin and Lightning work, we’re now accepting applications.
We have a lot of plans ahead and a lot of other educational programs in the pipeline — stay tuned!
Who Is Vinteum
Our founders
Lucas Ferreira, our Executive Director, has dreamed of funding Bitcoin developers from Brazil for the past four years. In the beginning, his idea was to organize community meetups and a conference to hopefully make enough profit to fund a Bitcoin Core developer. Covid ruined his plans back in 2020, but he later realized that even if he had the funding, he’d still need to find a developer to fund. That’s when he recruited a few Brazilian developers for an early version of the Chaincode Labs Seminars and the magic happened. Lucas also works at Lightning Labs, on Business Development and Community Building.
André Neves, our Director of Partnerships, is partly a product of the flywheel model of R&D companies funding open source Bitcoin developers. In early 2018, André was selected among 9 others to take part in the very first Chaincode Labs residency program for the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The network was in its infancy and André got to learn from those extremely talented developers working on the protocol implementation itself. Understanding that Lightning Network enabled true “money on the internet, at the speed of the internet” was all that was necessary for André to take the leap. André is the Co-Founder and CTO of Bitcoin gaming FinTech ZEBEDEE where he oversees all Product and Engineering efforts.
Our first grantee and Director of Education
Bruno Garcia is a Bitcoin Core developer dedicated to reviewing and testing PRs, extending and improving test coverage, and working on improvements for the P2P, Wallet, and the REST API modules in Bitcoin Core. Formerly a Brink grantee, his story of getting into Bitcoin development is deeply linked to the story of Vinteum. Vinteum evolved out of the efforts put into onboarding Bruno and the realization that we could bring more Brazilian developers to the space.
As Vinteum’s first grantee, not only will Bruno fully dedicate himself to Bitcoin open source development, but he also joins as our third team member. Bruno will spend most of his time on his work in Bitcoin Core, along with leading our educational efforts and mentoring the next generation of Brazilian Bitcoin developers.
Our Supporters
Vinteum is by bitcoiners, for bitcoiners.
Our work would not be possible without the generous philanthropic donations made by several individuals and companies in the industry. We’d like to thank John Pfeffer, Wences Casares, Sebastian Serrano, Okcoin, and the Human Rights Foundation for allowing us to propel Bitcoin development in Latin America further.
If you’d like to make a donation and help our cause, you can do so through our website vinteum.org.
Special thanks to Casa for providing us with state-of-the-art Bitcoin custody and Voltage for provisioning our Lightning Network node infrastructure.
What’s Next?
Look out for updates from the Vinteum team on our Twitter and submit your grant proposal information at vinteum.org.
