Dropping this here first!

"We are excited to launch FutureBit Grants, with our first recipient being Con Kolivas #[0] . Con has been instrumental in developing cgminer, ckpool, and propagating the stratum protocol, all of which have been the backbone of the Bitcoin mining infrastructure for the past decade. His open-source work has been co-opted into closed-source software used by large ASIC manufacturers and their pools, enabling them to make billions in profits with little credit to him and even less returned to the Bitcoin FOSS community to enable more decentralized mining solutions.

This changes today, and we are happy to contribute to work that will modernize the open-source ckpool. It will be deployed to all Apollo BTC units in the future, enabling every Apollo user to be their own stratum pool and solo mine to their own node. This will also be deployable to any small farm operator who wants to mine to their node and avoid centralized pools. We plan to continue investing in this space and enable R&D for additional decentralized pool protocols to ensure that Bitcoin's power remains squarely in the hands of the people."