We are strong believers in decentralization and in consensus driven planning, decision making, and execution.

Today, we wanted to share a bit about the way in which we’ve been operating and organizing ourselves over the past few months. We believe that now is a good opportunity to make that decentralized governance structure official in order to best setup the greater Bitcoin Private community for long-term success.

We won’t be appointing a new lead developer — instead we’ll be taking a number of steps to even further decentralize the development team for the core protocol. First, we’re going to split out core protocol development from any ecosystem related application development — there won’t be any titles, just a collection of independent developers working on the same project.

We’re also announcing the pending formation of the Bitcoin Private Foundation which will fund independent development and research in the privacy space. These two things will drive decentralization of core protocol development and ensure that all decisions are made via consensus driven governance.

Finally, we’re announcing the formation of the Bitcoin Private Nexus. Nexus will foster development of the BTCP ecosystem and applications that sit on top of the core protocol where a bit more centralized development might be beneficial.

To be clear, this is less of a change and more of a reflection and confirmation of the way we’ve already been operating for a while.

A decentralized, open source core community

Since the formation of the Bitcoin Private contribution team, we have strived to be truly decentralized. Indeed, the protocol operated for most of its existence sans a leader, but as a collective of developers seeking to produce an excellent blockchain for its community. Arguably the most successful blockchain project of all time, Bitcoin, operates in a similar fashion. While there are many exceptional blockchain projects that operate through a lead developer, we have found that this is unnecessary, and furthermore, counterintuitive to the end goal of maintaining a decentralized development ecosystem.

Thus, we are taking this opportunity to further bolster our commitment to a decentralized development community by ensuring that those who develop at the protocol level can fully focus on their work without distraction of any application or commercial related development initiative. We also believe this is the most effective manner of ensuring unbiased and sound protocol based innovation.

Backing the protocol development will be the Bitcoin Private Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on furthering digital privacy, is underway. This foundation will directly support the core protocol by funding independent developers and academics researching privacy-based blockchain technology.

Bitcoin Private Nexus

There are already some fantastic projects under development that harness the power of the Bitcoin Private protocol. As proven with other popular protocols in the greater crypto community, application development for the protocol is a catalyst for the adoption and widespread growth of a particular coin. The open source contribution team wants to foster such development and innovation.

The Bitcoin Private protocol development is the core of the ecosystem, however, it is important to keep in mind that the mission of bringing privacy technology to a mainstream audience is a multi-faceted effort. We believe it’s important for non-protocol development related initiatives to receive full focus and opportunity for success. Therefore, the Bitcoin Private Nexus will represent a next generation global community of technologists and innovators who create applications and enterprises that build towards a more decentralized ecosystem. It will represent communities who help raise awareness for the initiatives that exist within the greater Bitcoin Private world.

By housing consumer and enterprise related application development within Nexus, developers and teams will be able to fully focus on whatever problem(s) they are solving for the Bitcoin Private community. For example, some of the initiatives that are currently being worked on by various members of the greater BTCP contribution team include but are not limited to: the 4 phase merchant platform development, user friendly consumer facing wallets, and other prospective developments that may end up as their very own stand alone ventures. All of these examples are outside the purview of protocol development, but represent a potentially large impact toward creating the most productive and useful BTCP ecosystem possible.

Nexus will also represent a vehicle that allows outside developers and teams to contribute ideas, join specific development efforts, and help build the value of the Bitcoin Private world as a whole.

To be clear, the Bitcoin Private contribution team will continue to function as it has been. The appropriate, more commercially focused components of the BTCP contribution team will gradually come to exist within Nexus. This move will represent a massive step towards efficiency and will lay the groundwork for a faster growing, more decentralized Bitcoin Private ecosystem.

We are very excited to establish this over the next several months and we are confident this will make way for next generation innovation not only for the Bitcoin Private ecosystem, but more importantly for the greater crypto community at large. As we further finalize this new development, we will provide details along the way.

Closing thoughts:

It has been roughly two months since the Bitcoin Private mainnet launch and it is exciting to see how much the community has grown.

We’ll resume our tech & community focused updates next time — and over the next couple of weeks we will have a more detailed update on the merchant platform closed beta rollout, which is scheduled to commence testing with participating merchants later this week. If you wish to be included in the next beta testing round, please signup on the merchant platform web page. We are thrilled to show merchant adoption so soon after our inception and this will be a testament of not only the market need for commercial transaction privacy technology, but also of the open source development community that has come together to innovate on the Bitcoin Private protocol.

If you’d like to get involved with the development of Bitcoin Private, please join us on our GitHub or in our public Discord server.

We are excited to continue this community driven, open source journey to bring private transactions, both P2P and commercial, to a mainstream audience. Please leave any feedback you may have in the comments below or feel free to tweet at us!

Bitcoin Private Contribution Team