## Vinteum Grant Proposal

Leonardo L. Souza
github.com/oleonardolima
[npub1ez8efu9rjxu64g0lalty2ffmr2tgkzjz92rkafyfyz5463wr8ars8zls5t](https://njump.me/npub1ez8efu9rjxu64g0lalty2ffmr2tgkzjz92rkafyfyz5463wr8ars8zls5t)

I’m Leonardo, a Software Engineer and Bitcoiner currently based in Brazil. I’ve worked for the past 3+ years in a real-estate tech startup in Brazil, building back-end systems, focused on financial products, payments, fund transfer, and accounting tools, and recently joined a Bitcoin on-ramp/off-ramp focused startup.

I’ve been contributing to Bitcoin and FOSS projects since the start of 2022, where I participated in the [`SoB’22`](https://www.summerofbitcoin.org/) and worked with Lloyd Fournier towards building a real-time stream of block events library on top of the mempool.space API, focused on [`BDK`](https://github.com/bitcoindevkit).

I started contributing to [`Fedimint`](https://github.com/fedimint) this year, and got mentored by Eric Sirion as part of [`SoB’23`](https://www.summerofbitcoin.org/), working on adding Tor support on client level, for all usage and interaction between client and federation servers/peers, using Arti (The Rust implementation of Tor project).

### Summary

In the grant period, I will mainly focus my contributions on [`Fedimint`](https://github.com/fedimint) and [`BDK`](https://github.com/bitcoindevkit) projects, both on new features, code reviews, and documentation.

In addition to this, I plan to build and contribute to other sovereign and freedom tech ecosystems, as I'll be joining the [Sovereign Engineering - Cohort #1](https://sovereignengineering.io/2023/11/30/meet-the-1st-cohort.html).

### Goals

#### Fedimint:

* **Client & Server Tor Support**

I've been working the past few months on adding Tor support for the client level, but having native support on the server/federation level through Arti would be a huge accelerator on running federations on mainnet without relying on TLS certificates, contributing toward an easy way on running federations on common nodes: Umbrel, Start9, and others.

As of the next releases of Arti it's becoming possible, and I plan to continue contributing on that and adding this

* **MultiSig Co-Signing Module**

One of the biggest feature of Fedimint is the module system which relies on the Federation and it’s consensus for signing, and any consensus-based decision-making, and I plan to work on building a module, and contributing to the module ecosystem.

I will work in a co-signing module where the federation acts as a common signer on a MultiSig, where the user has all the privacy provided by the Federation structure, all while having a decentralized and distributed key, this added to a FROST support would make the addresses and signatures like any other Taproot one.

* **PassKeys Module**

I've discussed with Steve Myers and other folks about FIDO/Passkeys support for the rust-cktap project, and thinking further about it having a module that has such support would be great, and allow new features such as passwordless authentication on other services, through a federation. It would be a great alternative instead of relying on centralized parties to store and manage the user's PassKeys.

#### BDK:

* **`rust-esplora-client` and `rust-electrum-client` Tor Support**

I will continue my proposed work on adding native Tor support for both BDK `rust-esplora-client` and `rust-electrum-client` crates, in addition to the current proxying option available for the users. it would require on also adding async support `rust-electrum-client` as well.

In addition to the goals above, I also plan to contribute to other projects, such as: `rust-cktap`, `rust-bitcoin`, and general issues/features/documentations for both projects, improving the current `BDK` ecosystem, developing/contributing to client alternatives to current single Fedi client and helping the development of a bigger `Fedimint` module ecosystem.

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