When DEI Came to Bitcoin
when-dei-came-to-bitcoin
hodlonaut
#Bitcoin Taco pleb. Hodling. Always looking to learn. Speaking my mind. Editing http://citadel21.com
5 min read
In May 2019 a prominent Bitcoin Core developer called Matt Corallo posted a Twitter thread calling for DEI recruitment into Bitcoin development.
The same month, John Newbery hired a new co-organiser for Chaincode Labs' developer residency.
The man Newbery hired was Adam Jonas.
Jonas was not a protocol developer. He was a pro baseball player developer and scout before studying at the Flatiron School and then becoming their Director of Engineering.
He didn't just work at Flatiron. He was one of the first people the school trained, in its founding year, 2012.
Flatiron School is a New York coding bootcamp that makes DEI the explicit organising principle of its public identity.
Race- and gender-gated fellowships. A BLM-era DEI Taskforce. Cohort bonding sessions called "Feelings Friday."
A named core value: "Nurture Difference."
Newbery explained the Jonas hire in a Max Hillebrand Interview at Breaking Bitcoin Amsterdam in 2019: "Jonas's background is in education. He was working in the Flatine School and managing teams and projects there. So he has a lot of experience putting together these programs."
The qualification mentioned was programme architecture, from the Flatiron School.
"Feelings Friday" appeared at Chaincode's June 2019 residency. Sessions where cohort members process their emotions together.
Carla Kirk-Cohen, a 2019 resident, documented it on the What Bitcoin Did podcast 134 in August 2019: "We have Feelings Friday, at 4:30 on a Friday. We all grab a beer and unload our week's emotions."
Flatiron formalised the same named practice a year later.
Jonas carried it in.
Kirk-Cohen went on to be publicly named by Jonas as "our poster child" of the recruitment pipeline in an Adopting Bitcoin talk in December 2021. She subsequently joined the board of Brink, designated as an independent director.
On the Stephan Livera Podcast ep. 216 in October 2020 and The Anita Posch Podcast same month, Gloria recounts how Jonas cold-emailed her in January 2020 and urged here to apply again for a residency at Chaincode Labs.
She had applied to Chaincode the year before and been rejected. She had since lined up offers from Google and Facebook. She was about to remove all mention of blockchain from her resumé.
Jonas had been tracking her for over a year.
Jonas offered to set up a coffee chat at the Stanford Blockchain Conference with "some Chaincode Bitcoiners."
She said yes, and described how she expected to meet "nutty Bitcoin maximalists."
Instead she met John Newbery and Amiti Uttarwar.
Zhao sat with them for three hours.
Newbery told her, in what she recalled as his "very soft, British voice," that Bitcoin Core was "the most interesting project in the world."
Uttarwar told her to just clone the repository and try it.
She was accepted to Chaincode's residency that year, after meeting Amiti and John at the dinner. The year after being rejected.
Here's the thing... Uttarwar had followed the exact same path:
Rejected in 2018. Met Newbery at an Optech dinner in 2019. Accepted that same year.
Described here in a Coindesk piece "Amiti Uttarwar: Building Bitcoin's Future" from September 2021.
While Jonas was running the pipeline, he was also designing the institution (Brink) that would fund its output permanently.
Brink would become the single largest funder of Bitcoin Core developers. Over $17 million in documented donations.
The blueprint for it was written by the man running the residency, on his personal website, six weeks before it existed.
On October 16, 2020, Jonas published "Funding Bitcoin Development" on his personal site, arguing for a trusted nonprofit intermediary to fund Core developers.
Two days later he posted another blog post: "Starting a Bitcoin 501(c)(3)." A detailed operational blueprint. IRS process, approval timelines, legal gotchas.
Thirty-six days later, Brink launched.
It was presented as John Newbery's organisation. Jonas's name appeared nowhere in the public materials.
On launch day, Newbery told Jonas publicly: "Thank you for all of your help with Brink. Your initial research was what got the whole thing started."
That exchange is the only on-record acknowledgment that Jonas conceived it. It has never been addressed in any Brink public materials.
Six weeks after launch, Brink announced its first fellowship recipient.
Gloria Zhao.
The vote was cast by a three-person board: Newbery, Schmidt, and Harding.
The man who recruited her, mentored her, arranged her prior funding, and conceived the organisation was the man who cast one of the three votes.
No formal conflict-of-interest process is documented.
On the Anita Posch podcast, Zhao named, unprompted, the three people who brought her in:
"Amiti and Adam Jonas and John Newbery got me into Bitcoin Core."
Jonas's institutional influence and reach didn't stop at the recruiting pipeline and the funding.
In May 2024, Bitcoin Core's moderation guidelines were introduced at the weekly IRC meeting. The maintainer presenting them said: "ajonas wrote some moderation guidelines."
ajonas is Adam Jonas. Those same guidelines were used to mute Luke Dashjr on the OP_RETURN pull request and ban Antoine Riard from the Bitcoin Core repository entirely.
In July 2022 Gloria Zhao became a Bitcoin Core maintainer.
Only two and a half years had passed since her three hour coffee chat at Stanford with John Newbery and Amiti Uttarwar.
Typical time to reach maintainership is five to ten years.
On June 9, 2025, Gloria Zhao merged PR #32406, removing Bitcoin Core's OP_RETURN limit.
It was the most contested merge in recent Core history.
/end
Sources:
https://x.com/TheBlueMatt/status/988835275605504000
https://flatironschool.com/diversity-inclusion/
https://flatironschool.com/blog/carla-stickler-from-broadway-star-to-software-engineer/
https://stephanlivera.com/episode/216/
https://coindesk.com/markets/2020/12/08/amiti-uttarwar-building-bitcoins-future
https://x.com/jfnewbery/status/1331277518595354625
https://bitcoin-irc.chaincode.com/bitcoin-core-dev/2024-05-02 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/first-female-bitcoin-core-maintainer
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