A year in review: Hennadii Stepanov’s contributions to Bitcoin Core
2020 was an exciting year for Bitcoin. We saw large price movements, increased adoption, and despite memes to the contrary, major advancements in the development of the Bitcoin protocol and software projects in the surrounding ecosystem. At higher layers, improvements were made upon the lightning network, statechains, sidechains, discrete log contracts, RGB and more.1,2,3,4,5 There was notable progress in the development of Stratum v2, a protocol to enhance mining decentralization.6 Software which improves the security of key management has advanced at blistering speeds.7 Even low-level cryptographic libraries continued their march forward.8 Underpinning it all of course is Bitcoin Core, which saw changes to nearly all major components of the codebase.
Keeping up with just some of these projects can be a full time job, let alone directly participating in their development processes...