BitMEX Owner Awards a grant of $60K to Bitcoin Developer Michael Ford
As per the recent announcement, Bitcoin Core Contributor Michael Ford, titled as “fanquake,” received an award of $60,000 from the parent company of the leading crypto derivatives platform, BitMEX. In an official communiqué published on July 12, BitMEX owner and administrator HDR Global Trading announced its judgment to award the grant to Ford, revealing that he has lately been made the Bitcoin Core software project’s latest official maintainer. This implies the developer’s key has been added to the GitHub “trusted key list” file — giving him the capacity to plug into the Bitcoin Core codebase modifications.
HDR Global Trading submitted its judgment as a manner to provide substantial assistance to those who operate — generally voluntarily— to foster cryptocurrency growth. The statement made by HDR Global Trading Limited reads: “HDR Global Trading Limited, like all other cryptocurrency companies, depends extensively on the (mostly voluntary) work of Bitcoin’s mission and ideals coders. This job is stressful, challenging, and often unappreciated. We think it is the corporations’ responsibility to go and give back to the projects they reap the benefits from –and from which their very business model is growing by leaps and bound.
The post discusses that the grant is exclusive and demands Ford to operate as a core software maintainer on Bitcoin Core — showcasing the problems like further developing the reliability, functionality and security of the network. Likewise, HDR Global Trading states the grant is granted on a non-committal basis— apparently suggesting that it is not assumed that Ford will contribute to BitMEX on its own.
The announcement further accentuates that it is intended to acknowledge developers like Ford’s critical development work because of which platforms like BitMEX have sealed their victory. The officials went on to say that, “The BitMEX trading platform couldn’t have been built without millions and millions of hours dedicated by the OSS developers connecting everything from the operating systems to the internet servers, to the applications and Bitcoin itself.”
Lately, HDR Global Trading made an unconditional donation to the MIT Digital Currency project— which researches the growth of the global crypto ecosystem — stating that the company was happy to promote the activity of Bitcoin Core developers Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields.
Around the end of June, as Bitcoin (BTC) reached $13,000, BitMEX — the world’s most significant single bitcoin derivatives provider— published record quantities across its operations. The platform recorded $1billion of open market interest, with trade topping $13billion and over $16billion across the complete product spectrum of the BitMEX.
