It’s been three months since we announced the launch of Localhost Research at TABConf 6.
In that time, our board and operational team have been diligently working to establish and develop our organizational infrastructure, recruit talented individuals, and prepare ourselves for the coming months and years of continued growth. We’re excited to share with you some of our initial progress and introduce our newest team member.
In the coming months, we plan to open our office and onboard founding member Ava Chow and our soon-to-be-announced fourth contributor. Once our year-one team gets fully settled in, we will make some more detailed commitments as to the specific focus areas of our organization and publish monthly transparency reports.
In mid-January, our co-founder Mark Erhardt stepped into his full-time role as Lead Contributor, and last week we welcomed David Gumberg as a Junior Contributor. Though relatively new to the Bitcoin FOSS community, David’s work has reflected his genuine enthusiasm for Bitcoin Core and strong work ethic. His successful completion of the Chaincode ₿OSS program in 2024, followed by two consecutive OpenSats grants supporting his Bitcoin Core contributions through January 2025, are a reflection of that. We’re honored to have him on board.
During his time at Chaincode and OpenSats, David showed a particular interest in improving the performance of IBD (Initial Block Download). He has reviewed a number of PRs in that focus area (e.g. 28280, 30906, and 30039) and diagnosed a IBD slowdown in Windows (30833, 30844).
David has also been working with the informal benchmarking working group on benchcoin, a tool designed to measure the performance of long running benchmarks like IBD. He wrote an initial front end for the project. In researching IBD performance, David also wrote an experimental fork of Bitcoin Core with the explicit goal of investigating alternatives to LevelDB, based on theories stemming from observed read/write bottlenecks during IBD, with the added benefit that the db modifications enable multi-reader capability, a useful feature for users of libbitcoinkernel.
Beyond IBD, David has done work related to maintenance, CI, and the wallet. In 31770 and 31800 he bisected, diagnosed and reviewed the fix for an issue with Bitcoin Core’s oss-fuzz builds. More recently, David reviewed improvements to protecting wallet secrets in memory and opened a PR that fixes a similar issue (31166, 31774).
And that’s not everything! If you want to follow his work more closely, David keeps public notes for every PR he reviews which you can review in this repo. You can also see which PRs he has opened and reviewed on Bitcoin ACKs.
We are excited to continue supporting David in his journey as he gets more comfortable with the Bitcoin Core codebase and further establishes himself within the project. Stay tuned for more updates from him!
We’d also like to offer an abridged transparency report, focused on the work of Mark Erhardt: since joining, Mark has spent considerable time honing BIP3, his proposal for a new BIP Process, alongside his regular work as BIP Editor, which involves reviewing submissions to the BIP repository (e.g. BIP442: PAIRCOMMIT). Within Bitcoin Core, he has reviewed a number of PRs, some of which have focused on fee-related contexts within the codebase (e.g. 29278, 30535, 31278 and 26573). He also has shown an interest in the Erlay simulation work that Sergi Delgado is undertaking and has provided to him some useful feedback. His educational work remains steadfast, with continued oversight and contributions to Bitcoin Stack Exchange and Bitcoin Optech (including a great answer on mempool policy, the longest-ever Optech recap podcast and review of German translations of the Optech newsletter).
Please note that these transparency reports are not exhaustive. Thanks for reading and we look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks and months.