Vinteum, a Brazilian organization that funds contributors to Bitcoin Core, gained prominence in a report released by the BitMEX exchange. Entitled Who Bitcoin Core Funds? (Who funds Bitcoin Core), the report brings Vinteum as the sixth most commits in BTC code. This result puts Vinteum ahead of large companies in the market, such as exchanges OKCoin and Coinbase. Furthermore, Vinteum is even ahead of Trezor, one of the biggest hardware wallet manufacturers in the world. Founded by Brazilians Lucas Ferreira, from Lightning Labs, and André Neves, co-founder of the Lightning ZBD portfolio, Vinteum will train and fund open source developers to train a new generation of technicians and able to contribute to the evolution of BTC and the Lightning Network.
Projects and organizations that contributed the most to Bitcoin Core. Source: BitMEX. The BitMEX survey takes into account organizations that have contributed at least 10 commits to the Bitcoin Core code stored on GitHub. In this sense, the highlight goes to independent developers, who made the second largest contribution to the code.
Evolving the BTC and Lightning Ecosystem
With 100% Brazilian DNA, Vinteum has resources that support the work of developers who want to contribute to Bitcoin Core. After all, Bitcoin Core itself does not pay developers, and the vast majority of them do almost volunteer work. To bridge this gap, several companies and funds provide funding to support developers and keep these minds in BTC. In short, companies like Trezor, Coinbase, OKCoin and others have initiatives in this direction. And Vinteum came up to do this work in Brazil. According to André Neves, who spoke with CriptoFácil about the BitMEX report, Vinteum intends to help foster and maintain BTC decentralization. Currently, the organization is the official supporter of Bruno Garcia, one of the main Bitcoin Core developers from Brazil. In 2021, Garcia became known for resolving a bug in BTC’s Taproot update. As a result, Garcia had his name marked on the official Bitcoin Core version 0.21.1 list. Now, the developer is Vinteum’s Director of Education and the first Brazilian to receive financial support from the organization. “We are now the official backer of Bruno Garcia who is the only Bitcoin core dev of this level coming from Brazil. Bruno is our Director of Education and our first supporter. He is very good and works in an integral way just to make Bitcoin Core better”, said Neves.
Growth and future plans
The launch of Vinteum took place in August of this year, but the organization soon grew and now has around 16 members, as stated by Neves. Part of the team will be present at the Satsconf conference, the first conference focusing only on BTC, which will take place in São Paulo on November 8th. Lucas Ferreira, one of the creators of Vinteum, also organizes the event. Anyone interested in becoming a developer and working on the evolution of the BTC code can apply to receive support from Vinteum. But those who do not work in this area can also help through donations in BTC through the organization’s page. “We started in Brazil, where we have dominance and presence, and we are going to expand to the entire LATAM little by little. We are not taking “specific projects”, but looking at the person himself and how he can contribute to Bitcoin Core. In the future we want to have more developers like this too. We are very proud of Bruno and the Vinteum team for already having such an impact on the ecosystem”, concludes Neves.
