The beginning of fall is a great time to reflect on summer, express gratitude, and look ahead at the coming months.
In the summer of 2025, we hosted our first Visiting Scholar. The program was a great success, and we hoped to expand it. This summer, we did just that: we hosted two talented and promising contributors in our office!
In late June, Liam Gilligan joined our Visiting Scholar program as part of our Post-Quantum Cryptography Group. We met Liam through our local meetup community. He’s an active contributor to the secp256k1-jdk library and an undergraduate math student at UCSD.
While at Localhost, Liam had the opportunity to continue his work on secp256k1-jdk and BIP 462, as well as explore various areas in which the Bitcoin protocol is exposed to the threat of a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC).
Liam has taken a special interest in Bitcoin’s gossip network and the manners in which a CRQC could attack it. He spent some time thinking deeply about this problem and has started working on its resolution. We’re excited to support Liam’s continued interest in making the BIP 324 handshake quantum-secure and wish him the best of luck at school!
In early July, Praneeth Gunasekaran joined our Bitcoin Core Unit as a Visiting Scholar. Praneeth had recently published his research on covenants and vault design in Bitcoin and finished his MS in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, after working at BitcoinKeeper. Serendipity struck when Praneeth learned about our organization from Patricia’s presentation about Localhost Research at the Bitcoin is For Everyone conference in Portland.
As an organization, we take an interest in the Bitcoin Core Wallet. Users who wish to use Bitcoin Core with their hardware signers have historically relied on HWI, a Bitcoin Core adjacent library that is in the process of being sunset. Like us, Praneeth hoped the community would have a viable alternative. We identified the bhwi project as a promising alternative. Praneeth familiarized himself with the project and helped bhwi reach feature parity with HWI!
Both of these stories share a common thread: serendipity.
But serendipity is composed of many parts. It’s not just being at the right conference or meetup at the perfect time. At the foundation of it all is the generosity of our donors: the people and companies who believe in our vision and want to support our work.
Today, we are honored and grateful to announce the generous support of Sympatico Ventures. Last year, they committed $500,000 to our cause. To the entire Sympatico Ventures team, thank you. We’re so grateful to have you as part of the Localhost Research family.
Stay tuned for our fourth and fifth Transparency Reports which will include deeper dives into the work Liam and Praneeth completed during their time as Visiting Scholars at Localhost Research.