Arthur Hayes' Maelstrom is Paying Developers to Bulletproof Bitcoin

Arthur Hayes' (@CryptoHayes) family office @MaelstromFund has published its first Bitcoin Grant Program annual report, covering the period ending June 2026. The document offers a detailed look at who is being funded, what they are building, and why Maelstrom believes the work matters.

Four Active Developers, One Shared Mission

The program, which launched in October 2024, has supported five open-source $BTC developers in total since inception. Since October 2024, the program has funded five developers, four of whom are active. Current grantees are Rkrux, Stratospher, Benalleng, and Macgyver. Grant stacking is limited to $400,000 per year, and the four open-source Bitcoin developers receive monthly Bitcoin payments under 12-month contracts.

Two of the four work full-time on privacy protocols and two on Bitcoin Core, the network's standard software. Rkrux is one of Bitcoin Core's busiest code reviewers, with 1,155 review comments in 2025, while Stratospher focuses on fixing subtle bugs in the code that keeps the network in sync.

Privacy Takes Centre Stage

Benalleng and Macgyver build tools designed to make Bitcoin transactions harder to trace. Surveillance firms rely on the assumption that all coins entering a transaction belong to the sender. Benalleng's project, Payjoin, breaks that by letting the recipient quietly add their own coins, scrambling the money trail. It is already live in Bull Bitcoin and Cake Wallet, with five more integrations underway.

Silent Payments, Macgyver's focus, tackles address reuse, where receiving repeated payments at one address makes an entire transaction history public. A Coldcard pull request became the first hardware-device implementation of Silent Payments, but Core integration is stalled on a cryptographic library still under review, deliberately slow given that bugs there can put real money at risk.

The broader objective of the program is to help with the technical development of Bitcoin and enhance its resilience, scalability, censorship resistance, and privacy characteristics. Bitcoin is the bedrock asset in the crypto space and, unlike other crypto projects, never conducted an offering to raise funds for its technical development. Maelstrom, like other companies in the space, indirectly relies on the work of open-source Bitcoin developers.

Sources:
Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant Program (Official)
Yahoo Finance: Arthur Hayes' Family Office Bets On Bitcoin Privacy
The Block: Maelstrom Launches Bitcoin Developer Grant Program