Today we’re announcing our new project, Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Optech). We want to help Bitcoin companies adopt the best scaling techniques and technologies available to make efficient use of the blockchain, and thereby help Bitcoin to scale to more users and use cases.

We’re calling the project Bitcoin Operations Technology Group because we want to focus on operational technical work, such as segwit usage, transaction batching, fee estimation and coin selection. We’re as excited about Lightning, Schnorr signatures, Taproot/Graftroot and scriptless scripts as any other Bitcoin engineers, but the project’s focus is on technology that can be deployed by companies today. As new technologies mature, we will help companies adopt and integrate them.

We’re really excited about our new initiative and hope that we can do our part to contribute to a more collaborative atmosphere in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

With generous support from Wences Casares, John Pfeffer and Chaincode Labs, we’ve spent the last few months meeting engineers and managers from across the ecosystem; started producing weekly newsletters for Bitcoin engineers highlighting ways that they could use the blockchain more effectively; and organized our first workshop in San Francisco, bringing together engineers from exchanges, custodians and wallet companies utilizing the Bitcoin blockchain to discuss efficient use of the blockchain and ways to engage with the open source community.

Over the coming months, we plan to:

Continue engaging with engineers from companies using the Bitcoin network and with the open source community. We don’t claim to be the representative for either side, but on the whole we think the more engagement there is between industry and open source, the better.

Continue producing high quality technical content in the form of weekly newsletters and potentially a ‘scaling cookbook’.

Hold more workshops for Bitcoin engineers to discuss real-world scaling issues, and feed findings back to the open source community.

Host an online forum for Bitcoin engineers to discuss technical scaling issues.

Monitor the adoption of scaling techniques and the general health of the Bitcoin network.

Above all, it’s very important to highlight what we’re not:

We’re not a Bitcoin foundation. We’re just engineers and contributors who care about Bitcoin and want to see it succeed.

We don’t represent Bitcoin Core. We’ve all contributed to that project, but our work with Bitcoin Optech is project-agnostic.

We don’t represent and are not beholden to any Bitcoin companies.

We’re not profit-driven. We’re fortunate enough to have sponsorship to carry out our work, and are asking for modest contributions from member companies to cover our expenses.

If you’re an engineer or manager at a Bitcoin company or an open source contributor and you’d like to be a part of this, please contact us at info@bitcoinops.org or sign up for our newsletter on our web site.