Mike Schmidt

BuilderCrypto

Co-founder and executive director of Brink, an independent nonprofit that funds and mentors the open-source engineers who maintain Bitcoin's protocol — the node security, testing, and maintenance work no company owns. A Bitcoin Optech contributor since 2018, he coordinates the Bitcoin Security Consortium, through which nine major institutions pledged $15 million over three years toward Bitcoin's long-term security and post-quantum cryptography. His work treats protocol maintenance as a public good: money meant to outlast its builders needs a funded engineering commons.