Maelstrom adds Tadge Dryja as 6th recipient of Bitcoin Grant Program

Maelstrom, the family office run by BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, just handed its sixth Bitcoin Grant Program award to one of the network’s most quietly important builders. Tadge Dryja, best known as a co-creator of the Lightning Network, will use the funding to research how to harden Bitcoin against the looming threat of quantum computers.

What Dryja is actually working on

The grant supports Dryja’s research into post-quantum cryptographic defenses for Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s current security relies on elliptic-curve cryptography, which works brilliantly against today’s computers. The concern, shared by a growing number of researchers, is that sufficiently powerful quantum machines could eventually break those protections.

Dryja has already been working on solutions. He’s developed a commit/reveal scheme he calls “Lifeboat,” designed to protect transactions from quantum attacks. He’s also proposed a mechanism called OP_CIV for post-quantum signature aggregation, which would let Bitcoin verify quantum-resistant signatures more efficiently.

Dryja’s broader body of work includes Utreexo, a data structure that could dramatically reduce the storage requirements for running a Bitcoin full node.

Inside the Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant Program

Maelstrom launched its Bitcoin Grant Program on July 17, 2024. The program offers grants between $50,000 and $150,000 for a 12-month period, paid out monthly in BTC, USDC, or USDT. The focus areas are resilience, scalability, censorship resistance, and privacy.

Dryja is the sixth recipient. A June 2026 annual report detailed the accomplishments of four prior grantees, whose work has spanned privacy-enhancing tools like Payjoin and Silent Payments, along with scalability improvements to Bitcoin Core.

Payjoin is a transaction method that makes blockchain analysis significantly harder by blending sender and receiver inputs. Silent Payments let users receive Bitcoin without reusing addresses, which is a privacy upgrade that sounds boring until you realize address reuse is one of the easiest ways to deanonymize someone on-chain.

The specific dollar amount of Dryja’s grant hasn’t been disclosed. But given the program’s stated range, we’re looking at something in the $50,000 to $150,000 neighborhood.

The quantum clock is ticking, kind of

No quantum computer today can break Bitcoin’s cryptography. Current machines don’t have nearly enough stable qubits to run Shor’s algorithm against the elliptic curves Bitcoin uses. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has already standardized several post-quantum cryptographic algorithms for broader use, which creates a foundation that Bitcoin researchers can build on.

Dryja’s Lifeboat proposal doesn’t require Bitcoin to adopt entirely new signature schemes overnight. Instead, it creates an emergency mechanism that users could activate to protect their funds if quantum capabilities suddenly leapt forward.

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