Fellow Davidson Souza will continue to develop various Bitcoin projects after a Summer of Bitcoin internship, including Utreexo.
Vinteum, a Brazilian non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Bitcoin research and development, announced its second recipient of donations for protocol development, in a statement sent to Bitcoin Magazine.
Davidson Souza will receive the second Vinteum grant to continue providing wallet-enabled implementations for the Rust Utreexo library. Souza will then integrate the library with Spiral’s Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK). Additionally, Souza will develop bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs) around implementations, assist with protocol development, and contribute to other projects such as Rust Bitcoin.
Utreexo is a Bitcoin hash accumulator initially proposed by Tadge Dryja, co-author of the Lightning Network white paper. The hash accumulator serves as an alternate database used to represent unspent transaction output (UTXO). The alternate dataset allows nodes to obtain and verify information related to UTXOs. By doing this, the information provided to nodes enables scalability benefits, decreasing the amount of storage needed by full nodes without changing anything regarding the security of the Bitcoin protocol. The process can also make running a node cheaper, speed up initial block downloads, and be used as an oracle for pools of UTXOs for different projects.
Souza initially attended some unofficial Venteum seminars that led him to participate in the Summer of Bitcoin, where he met his future mentor Calvin Kim, who is a Bitmex beneficiary. Kim began guiding Souza to port the Go Utreexo library to Rust so that anyone could validate Utreexo tests against Rust code.
“Davidson performed strongly during the Summer of Bitcoin program, demonstrating his understanding of Bitcoin at the protocol level and was productive in understanding and implementing the Utreexo algorithms,” Kim said.
Vinteum launched in August with a mission to train and fund open source developers for the Bitcoin ecosystem in Brazil. The nonprofit organization announced its first member at the launch, Bruno Garcia, who also joined the group as a founding member.