The team behind a long-contentious proposal to upgrade the bitcoin protocol has announced it is making new funding available for research.

In a blog post today, the Bitcoin Unlimited team revealed it has “several hundred thousand” dollars available to fund work it believes will help restore “Satoshi’s vision” for a global peer-to-peer digital cash system.

The statements reflect criticisms of Bitcoin Core, the protocol’s dominant development team, who have pushed to implement top-level networks that extend bitcoin’s functionality without altering its current blockchain rules. Bitcoin Unlimited, by contrast, promotes the idea of on-chain scaling that would boost the number of transactions that could be settled directly on the blockchain, but bring additional consensus changes.

Areas where Bitcoin Unlimited is seeking submissions include longer-term scaling initiatives; incremental scaling improvements; empirical studies; quality control; and outreach.

Additional details about the application process can be found here.

Trumpet image via Shutterstock