Less than a year after joining a training programme in São Paulo, developer Erick Cestari was in Berlin presenting his security research at one of the leading international Lightning network conferences. During the same period, he spent four months as a security engineering intern at Lightning Labs, one of the most prominent companies in the global Bitcoin ecosystem.
His path is not an exception. The fourth annual report from Vinteum, a non-profit that funds open-source Bitcoin development in Brazil and Latin America, published today, shows that the first cohort of its training programme, the Bitcoin Dev Launchpad, produced concrete results: former participants secured independent grants from international organisations such as OpenSats and BDK Foundation, were hired by global companies in the sector — Boltz, Second and Lightning Labs — and two of them became grantees of Vinteum itself.
Vinteum also supported contributors' participation in conferences, workshops, residencies and collaboration meet-ups in Brazil, Europe and the United States. These experiences allow Brazilian developers to work directly with maintainers, researchers and other contributors, building the relationships and trust needed for lasting participation in global projects.
Today, 36 members of the Vinteum community are actively working on open-source Bitcoin development — the open-source software that underpins the network globally. Of these, 8 are developers directly funded by the organisation's grants, and 13 are fellows in full-time training.
The challenge of training developers in the AI era
The most unexpected finding in the report concerns the programme's second cohort, which had to be redesigned because of artificial intelligence. AI tools now produce plausible-looking code even when the user does not actually understand the underlying problem — which made it insufficient to assess candidates solely on what they deliver.
Vinteum's response was to change what gets measured: one-on-one discussions, iterative review and the ability to explain, defend and improve one's own decisions now carry more weight than the volume of code produced.
Before submitting contributions to official projects, participants began working on supervised copies, reviewed internally by experienced developers — and maintainers of international projects have commented positively on the maturity of the contributions that passed through this filter.
"Our goal is not to maximise the number of people entering the programme or the volume of pull requests produced," says Lucas Ferreira, co-founder and executive director of Vinteum. "We want to help more people become independent, trustworthy contributors capable of taking on long-term responsibilities in open-source Bitcoin projects."
This model is, by design, intensive and personalised: each developer receives close mentorship and individual follow-up, with sustained discussions about their technical decisions — meaning the programme grows deliberately selectively, prioritising depth over volume.
The selection process for the second cohort reflects this rigour: more than 300 applicants, 133 selected to begin, 23 invited to the in-person residency and, in the end, 12 fellowships and 2 direct grants for those who showed the greatest readiness for long-term work.
"My journey in open source began with Vinteum's Bitcoin Dev Launchpad, which became my gateway into the Bitcoin ecosystem and which, looking back, was almost like a Disneyland for me," says Lucas Balieiro, a participant in the programme's first cohort.
"After the programme, I was selected for a fellowship and started contributing directly to the Stratum V2 Reference Implementation" — the reference software for the protocol that gives individual miners more control over block construction.
An ecosystem growing beyond the organisation
The report also documents the expansion of the infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin development in Brazil: 67 technical meet-ups held by BitDevs communities across nine cities over the year, more than 120 students from eight universities reached through Bitcoin Students Day, and dozens of recurring weekly online sessions among study groups, public mentoring and office hours. Casa21, the organisation's physical space in São Paulo, has also begun operating as shared technical infrastructure, with servers dedicated to testing and research.
For the coming year, the report describes the stated challenge as "consolidation with direction": creating more continuous entry points for new developers through seminars, universities, local communities and Casa21, without giving up the intensive mentorship that the first cohort's results showed to be decisive.
The full report is available here.
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