OKX Joins Okcoin Developer Grant Program, Announces Co-Sponsorship Award to Bitcoin Developer Dusty Daemon

Hong Kong SAR, 19 May 2023 - OKX, the world's second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume and a leading Web3 technology company, today announced it has joined Okcoin's Open Source Developer Grants program in support of independent developers building and enhancing the Bitcoin protocol.

OKX and Okcoin also announced that the two firms would co-sponsor the latest Open Source Developer Grant recipient, Dusty Daemon, who is developing Splicing, a powerful new feature for the Lightning Network which vastly improves its ability to scale, making it easier for everyday people to use Bitcoin for small payments and instant settlement.

OKX Chief Innovation Officer Jason Lau said: "Bitcoin is constantly being enhanced by open source developers who dedicate themselves to contributing to the protocol's development, and we strongly believe that they deserve support and recognition from the industry. OKX will always be a strong supporter of the Bitcoin community and is very pleased to work with Okcoin to extend a grant to Dusty Daemon for his invaluable work on the Lightning Network."

Dusty Daemon said: "In 2021 I left the corporate rat race with whatever savings I could muster and started learning everything I could about the Lightning Network. Lightning scales bitcoin payments to almost the entire world, but it also is the first truly trustless instant payment settlement. This is leaps and bounds ahead of traditional payment methods and gets us closer to a future where people can enjoy more freedom when it comes to their money and finances. It's only because of grants like this that I'm able to do this work full time and I thank OKX and Okcoin for the incredible support."

OKX and Okcoin's support of Dusty Daemon will allow him to work full-time on Splicing. In particular, Dusty will focus his efforts on the following four technical areas:

• Unified Bitcoin Balance: No more "on-chain" and "off-chain" distinction between Bitcoin and Lightning! Users always get the benefits of Lightning, while wallet software handles the onchain splicing payment to resize channels for the user on the fly.
• Increased Privacy: Allows multiple Lightning peers to splice at one time in one transaction. Similar to a "coin join," this improves privacy and reduces transaction costs.
• Significantly Reduced Costs: Move funds from outwardly unbalanced channels to inwardly balanced channels without relying on paid services, vastly reducing costs for large scale operators.
• Seamless channel rebalancing and resizing: Managing inbound vs outbound liquidity is an incredibly complex hurdle rate for using Lightning effectively. Splicing allows you to move funds in and out of channels, on and off chain, with zero downtime.

Dusty is also supported by grants from Human Rights Foundation and Superlunar.

Okcoin started its Open Source Developer Grant Program in 2019 and has since donated over USD 1.5 million to Bitcoin research and development of Bitcoin Core and the Lightning Network.

OKX is a longtime supporter of Bitcoin, having integrated the Lightning Network to its centralized exchange in early 2021. OKX Wallet also recently announced that it is the first multi-chain wallet to support BRC-20 trading with the launch of its Ordinals Marketplace.