Page 5

‍

4. Diversity and Global Representation

‍

Bitcoin's contributor base is geographically and culturally diverse:

‍

Developers from Netherlands, US, Germany, China, Nigeria, Brazil and beyond.

‍

Language localization by volunteers in 40+ languages.

‍

Cultural neutrality enables global trust and adoption.

‍

Bitcoin Core Translation Repository:

https://www.transifex.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/

‍

5. Trust Through Transparency

‍

All contributions to Bitcoin Core are open source, with complete code and discussion logs available publicly. This level of transparency ensures:

‍

Peer review of every code commit.

‍

Accountability in proposal discussions (via BIP process).

‍

Community-driven decision-making without private governance councils.

‍

6. Decentralized Labor Coordination

‍

Bitcoin’s contributors are not employees, but distributed professionals supported by decentralized fundraising models. This reduces the risk of capture, political interference, or single-point failure.

‍

Comparison with foundation-led models:

‍

7. Key Takeaways for Investors

‍

No single entity can “fire” a contributor or co-opt the codebase.

‍

Code quality and security are ensured via open peer review, not executive control.

‍

Protocol evolution is slow by design—an advantage for monetary policy integrity.

‍

A broad, ideologically aligned contributor base defends against hostile takeover risks.

‍

Bitcoin’s key contributors are guardians of protocol stability, not growth marketers or fundraisers. This orientation is a strategic strength for investors seeking low-risk monetary infrastructure, not speculative app platforms.

‍

Next up: Section 2D – Advisors and Investors

‍

Project & Team Analysis – Bitcoin (BTC)

D. Advisors and Investors

‍

Unlike most blockchain projects, Bitcoin does not have formal advisors or traditional venture capital investors due to its unique launch and governance model. There was no pre-sale, no initial coin offering (ICO), and no foundation allocating tokens to investors or insiders. However, to maintain an institutional-grade analysis, we will reinterpret this section by focusing on the ecosystem of influential stakeholders, strategic financial backers of development, and indirect investment participation through Bitcoin-aligned enterprises and funds.

‍

1. No Traditional Advisory Board – A Feature, Not a Flaw

‍

Bitcoin’s launch structure ensures it has no advisory council, no VC boardroom, and no centralized governance framework. This deliberate vacuum of power and absence of advisory gatekeepers positions Bitcoin as a neutral, sovereign monetary layer, free from corporate or political capture.

‍

Compare with other protocols:

‍

This absence minimizes single-point failure risks, regulatory capture, and reputational dependency on individuals or institutions.

‍

2. Who Funds Bitcoin Development?

‍

While there is no centralized foundation like Ethereum’s, Bitcoin Core development and ecosystem infrastructure are community- and grant-funded, often by aligned firms or philanthropic arms of Bitcoin-aligned institutions.

‍

Key Development Grant Organizations:

‍

Spiral: https://spiral.xyz

‍

Brink: https://brink.dev

‍

HRF Dev Fund: https://hrf.org/devfund/

‍

OpenSats: https://opensats.org

‍

Bitcoin development has no reliance on a single entity, a sharp contrast to VC-backed projects where funding often dictates protocol direction.

‍

3. Infrastructure Investors: Strategic Capital Entry Points

‍

Although Bitcoin itself didn’t raise venture capital, infrastructure companies and ecosystem layers have received substantial investment, offering institutional exposure to BTC upside.

‍

Notable Bitcoin-Aligned Companies & Investors

‍

Example:

Blockstream funding rounds 

‍

Lightning Labs seed round 

‍

Although these firms do not control Bitcoin, they support critical infrastructure layers, from custody to payments to enterprise adoption. VCs often access BTC exposure via these satellite investments.

‍

4. Institutional BTC Allocators

‍

Bitcoin adoption has accelerated via direct capital deployment by major corporations, asset managers, and hedge funds. This makes BTC the only protocol with top-tier balance sheet endorsements, aligning it with gold or treasuries rather than speculative digital assets.

‍

A. Corporate Treasury Allocations

‍

MicroStrategy Bitcoin page: https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin

Tesla SEC filings: https://ir.tesla.com

‍

MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor describes BTC as “Digital Energy on a balance sheet”, pioneering the concept of corporate treasury hedging via crypto reserves.

‍

B. Publicly Traded Bitcoin Funds

‍

With the SEC’s approval of spot BTC ETFs in 2024, several asset managers launched Bitcoin-based instruments:

‍

Source:

BlackRock IBIT: https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/products/334010614/ishares-bitcoin-trust

‍

Fidelity ETF: https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/bitcoin

ARK ETF: https://21shares.com/en/product/arkb/

‍

These ETFs now serve as regulated, custody-backed vehicles for institutional BTC exposure, reducing operational and custody friction for allocators.

‍

5. Private Funds and Hedge Funds

‍

Several hedge funds and macro investors have treated Bitcoin as a macro hedge, high-beta risk asset, or digital gold equivalent in their portfolios.

‍

Notable institutional players:

‍

Paul Tudor Jones: BTC as “fastest horse in the race” (2020).

‍

Stan Druckenmiller: BTC vs Gold thesis (2021).

‍

Renaissance Technologies, SkyBridge, Greyscale – early BTC buyers and fund issuers.

‍

These endorsements show Bitcoin’s maturation into a macroeconomic asset class, with institutional-grade validation far beyond any altcoin.

‍

6. Sovereign and Policy-Level Advisors

‍

Although no single advisor guides Bitcoin, its architecture is being studied or adopted at a sovereign level.

‍

El Salvador: First country to adopt BTC as legal tender (2021).

‍

Central African Republic: Second country to do so.

‍

U.S. Senate/House Committees: Hearings on Bitcoin’s systemic implications.

‍

FATF & IMF: Bitcoin in regulatory policy debates.

‍

Example – https://www.reuters.com/technology/el-salvadors-bitcoin-law-takes-effect-2021-09-07/

‍

Sovereign interest in Bitcoin stems from its ability to challenge dollar hegemony, provide financial inclusion, and serve as a digital reserve asset.

‍

7. Governance by Market Forces, Not Advisors

‍

Instead of an advisory council, Bitcoin’s direction is governed by miner incentives, node consensus, user behavior, and free-market competition.

‍

No advisory board can override these forces:

‍

Miners secure network but cannot alter rules.

‍

Nodes reject invalid blocks, enforce protocol.

‍

Users vote with wallets, not executives.

‍

This game-theoretic governance system makes Bitcoin robust against internal capture—a model that advisors cannot replicate.

‍

8. Summary: Bitcoin’s Investor and Advisor Structure

‍

Key Investor Takeaway:

‍

Bitcoin’s strength lies not in curated advisory panels or institutional branding, but in its resistance to control, structural neutrality, and investor-aligned incentive layers. Sophisticated capital is increasingly recognizing this, not as a weakness, but as the ultimate moat in digital assets.

‍

Next up: Section 2E – Team and Progress

‍

Project & Team Analysis – Bitcoin (BTC)

E. Team and Progress

‍

Bitcoin's progress, unlike traditional technology startups, does not follow a centralized roadmap or corporate milestone chart. Its growth trajectory has been defined by open-source community contributions, protocol hardening, grassroots infrastructure expansion, and adoption across diverse global domains. In this section, we analyze Bitcoin’s development pace, contributor progress, implementation success, and key achievements—both at the software protocol level and the broader ecosystem layer. We also assess the challenges faced along the way and evaluate the evolving maturity of the Bitcoin project from an institutional due diligence perspective.

‍

The most striking aspect of Bitcoin’s development progress lies in its evolutionary conservatism. Bitcoin does not iterate rapidly like venture-backed altcoins; instead, its updates are deliberate, extensively peer-reviewed, and often years in the making. This cautious development approach aligns with Bitcoin’s positioning as a monetary base layer rather than an experimental tech stack.

‍

From a software engineering perspective, Bitcoin’s codebase has undergone continual refinement since 2009. The initial version, released by Satoshi Nakamoto, has since been restructured by hundreds of contributors to ensure modularity, security, and scalability. Key milestones include the implementation of features like Segregated Witness (SegWit), which resolved transaction malleability issues and laid the groundwork for Layer 2 solutions. SegWit, first proposed in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 141, was activated in 2017 after extensive community coordination and testing. This upgrade also marked a significant turning point in Bitcoin’s on-chain efficiency and scalability, reducing transaction size and enabling more flexible scripting functionalities.

‍

The success of SegWit was followed by another major protocol enhancement—the Taproot soft fork, which went live in November 2021. Taproot, which encompassed BIPs 340, 341, and 342, introduced improvements in transaction privacy, efficiency, and smart contract expressiveness. The proposal was first conceptualized by developer Greg Maxwell in 2018 and subsequently implemented by Pieter Wuille and others. Taproot’s activation required the coordinated signaling of over 90 percent of miners globally and reflected the maturity of Bitcoin’s decentralized upgrade process. The implications of Taproot extend beyond technical optimization—it also demonstrates that a globally distributed and ideologically diverse community can still reach consensus without a central governance authority.

‍

On the infrastructural level, Bitcoin has seen exponential progress in scalability solutions, especially through the development of the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network, a Layer 2 protocol designed to enable near-instantaneous and low-fee micropayments, has grown significantly since its mainnet debut in 2018. As of early 2025, the Lightning Network has over 6,000 active nodes and upwards of 100,000 payment channels, with an estimated capacity of over 5,000 BTC. More importantly, companies like Strike, Lightning Labs, and River Financial have integrated Lightning functionality into user-friendly interfaces, enabling both institutional payment rails and global remittance services. Lightning has even been adopted at the national level, as in the case of El Salvador, where it underpins Bitcoin-based merchant transactions and ATM networks.

‍

Another noteworthy aspect of Bitcoin’s team-related progress is its decentralized funding infrastructure. Unlike typical projects that rely on internal capital reserves or VC financing, Bitcoin’s development community is sustained through grants and fellowships provided by ecosystem-aligned organizations. Brink, Spiral (Block Inc.’s Bitcoin-focused fund), the Human Rights Foundation, and OpenSats have funded dozens of full-time developers, ensuring continuity without compromising decentralization. This funding model also allows contributors to remain ideologically independent, as they are not beholden to the strategic goals of any centralized entity.

‍

Furthermore, the ecosystem has witnessed a proliferation of educational, developer onboarding, and research programs aimed at strengthening the technical community around Bitcoin. Organizations like Chaincode Labs, Bitcoin Optech, and Summer of Bitcoin offer mentorship, workshops, and internships that have helped onboard a new generation of contributors. These initiatives are critical in ensuring that Bitcoin’s codebase remains secure, peer-reviewed, and generationally sustainable. It also expands the contributor base beyond the legacy cypherpunk crowd into diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds, with developers now emerging from India, Nigeria, Brazil, Ukraine, and Southeast Asia.

‍

In terms of code contribution activity, Bitcoin Core remains one of the most actively maintained codebases in the blockchain space. As of 2025, the Bitcoin GitHub repository has over 1,200 contributors, with consistent pull requests, bug reports, peer review cycles, and test coverage enhancements. Importantly, contributions are not dictated by a central planning team, but rather emerge organically based on community discussion, research, and needs identified through user experience and scalability data. This reflects a high degree of software development decentralization rarely seen in protocol-level projects.

‍

One of the often overlooked dimensions of Bitcoin’s progress is the increasing maturity of its ecosystem services. Custody platforms, multi-signature wallets, key management tools, and institutional-grade asset security infrastructure have grown dramatically over the past five years. Companies like Unchained Capital, Casa, and Ledger have innovated in secure, user-controlled custody solutions, significantly de-risking Bitcoin from a technical usability standpoint. At the institutional level, Fidelity Digital Assets, Coinbase Custody, NYDIG, and Bakkt provide compliance-grade custody frameworks that satisfy the requirements of asset managers and regulatory bodies.

‍

Mining infrastructure also highlights Bitcoin’s evolution. The global hash rate now exceeds 550 exahashes per second, marking a dramatic rise in network security and resource commitment since Bitcoin’s inception. This increase is accompanied by the professionalization of mining operations, with public mining companies like Marathon Digital, Riot Platforms, and CleanSpark operating large-scale data centers with renewable energy integrations. Additionally, the Bitcoin Mining Council, led in part by Michael Saylor, has helped provide transparency on Bitcoin’s energy usage, promoting sustainability practices and debunking negative narratives around environmental impact.

‍

Despite these achievements, Bitcoin has not been without challenges. Internal community conflict has occasionally slowed progress, particularly during the Block Size Wars of 2016–2017. Disagreements over scaling approaches led to several contentious forks, most notably Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, but Bitcoin Core emerged with stronger consensus principles and broader ideological support. These events demonstrated the resilience of Bitcoin’s decentralization—not through unity of opinion, but through the capacity to survive ideological fragmentation while preserving protocol integrity.

‍

Another ongoing challenge has been the onboarding of non-technical users. While self-custody has become easier thanks to advancements in wallet UX, Bitcoin still requires greater investment in accessibility to compete with custodial platforms. However, developers have responded to this need with innovations like Seedless Wallets, PayJoin privacy enhancements, and progress toward more intuitive backup schemes such as Shamir’s Secret Sharing.

‍

Looking at real-world adoption metrics, Bitcoin is showing strong progress. Active addresses average over 900,000 per day, and Bitcoin held on exchanges continues to decline, indicating a shift toward long-term self-custody. In parallel, institutional Bitcoin ownership—via ETFs, corporate treasuries, or fund mandates—has introduced new liquidity dynamics while cementing Bitcoin’s legitimacy in capital markets.

‍

Finally, Bitcoin’s progress must be viewed not merely in software releases but in cultural and geopolitical impact. From influencing central bank digital currency (CBDC) policies to offering financial lifelines in hyperinflationary countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Turkey, Bitcoin’s societal utility continues to evolve beyond its original payment use case. It is now regarded globally as an asset of strategic significance—a status achieved not through marketing campaigns or advisory boards, but through the tireless, often anonymous work of its contributor community and the collective resilience of its decentralized architecture.

‍

In conclusion, Bitcoin’s progress is defined not by rapid iteration but by principled refinement, technological hardening, and global decentralization of trust and labor. Its development is a case study in decentralized execution, setting it apart from every other digital asset in existence.

‍

Next: Section 2F – Governance Structure

‍

Project & Team Analysis – Bitcoin (BTC)

F. Governance Structure

‍

Bitcoin’s governance structure is one of the most misunderstood yet fundamentally critical components of its long-term viability as a decentralized monetary protocol. Unlike traditional organizations that operate under hierarchical management systems, or even other blockchain projects that maintain centralized foundations or advisory councils, Bitcoin’s governance is emergent, decentralized, and protocol-native. It is rooted in voluntary participation, consensus-driven code upgrades, economic game theory, and peer-reviewed development proposals—all of which work collectively to preserve the integrity of the network while allowing for measured technical advancement.

‍

The core of Bitcoin’s governance lies in a multi-layered model composed of several key stakeholders: users (node operators), miners, developers, businesses, and custodians. Each group has a defined role, but no single group can unilaterally dictate changes to the protocol. The balance between these stakeholders creates a self-regulating, distributed governance system that emphasizes decentralization over efficiency, and resilience over rapid evolution.

‍

The first layer of Bitcoin governance begins with the Bitcoin Core developers, who maintain and improve the reference implementation of the Bitcoin software. However, it is critical to understand that these developers do not hold centralized control over Bitcoin. They cannot force upgrades onto the network, nor can they compel miners or nodes to accept changes. Instead, developers propose upgrades in the form of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). These proposals undergo rigorous public discussion, code audits, testing, and community review before being considered for implementation.

‍

The BIP process itself is a cornerstone of Bitcoin governance. Any developer in the world can draft and submit a BIP. The community then debates the merits, risks, and implementation details of each proposal. The BIP repository is publicly accessible on GitHub, allowing for complete transparency and open participation in the development process. Historically, only proposals that achieve broad support from the community—both technically and socially—are ever activated. This ensures that Bitcoin evolves through a process of emergent consensus, not dictated authority.

‍

However, even if a BIP is accepted by developers, it must still pass another key test: adoption by node operators. Full nodes are software clients that validate transactions and enforce consensus rules. Because any user can run a node, they act as the final gatekeepers of protocol changes. If a node rejects a proposed change, it simply refuses to follow that version of the chain. This creates a built-in veto mechanism, where even widely supported developer upgrades cannot succeed without broad adoption by the global user base.

‍

Miners, who contribute computing power to secure the network, also play a governance role, although their influence is often overstated. While miners can signal support for upgrades through mechanisms like version bits or activation flags, they cannot override the consensus rules enforced by full nodes. If miners attempt to mine blocks that violate the network’s consensus rules, those blocks will be rejected by honest nodes, rendering them worthless. This reinforces the primacy of node governance over hash power—a critical safeguard against mining cartels or collusion.

‍

Businesses and service providers such as exchanges, custodians, and payment processors also contribute to governance indirectly. Their operational decisions—such as which Bitcoin software version to run or which forks to support—affect liquidity flows, market narratives, and user preferences. However, these entities have no formal control over the protocol and must ultimately comply with whatever rules are enforced by nodes and accepted by the broader network.

‍

This decentralized and non-hierarchical governance framework stands in stark contrast to the models used by most other blockchain projects. For example, Ethereum has a clearly identifiable leadership figure in Vitalik Buterin and a formal foundation that helps coordinate upgrades. Solana Labs, Avalanche’s Ava Labs, and other protocols operate under corporate structures with equity funding and centralized roadmaps. In contrast, Bitcoin’s slow, conservative upgrade cycle is a deliberate design feature—not a flaw—intended to protect it as a monetary base layer.

‍

One illustrative example of Bitcoin’s governance in action was the SegWit upgrade in 2017. This proposal aimed to improve transaction efficiency and pave the way for scaling layers like Lightning. Although it was technically sound and broadly supported by developers, it faced resistance from some large mining pools and businesses. A contentious period ensued, culminating in the User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) movement—a grassroots campaign initiated by node operators who signaled their intent to activate SegWit regardless of miner support. This pivotal moment affirmed that Bitcoin’s governance power resides with users, not miners or corporations, and it ultimately led to a successful upgrade without central intervention.

‍

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. We invite you to explore more content on our blog for additional insights and information.

https://www.thestandard.io/blog  

‍

"If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [Email “Coming Soon”]. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to hearing from you."

‍

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

PAGE 6: www.thestandard.io/blog/bitcoin-btc-the-rise-of-cryptocurrency-in-2025-6