Who are the current YMYM developers?

The development of YMYM is open, permissionless, and participatory. Over the years, a varied group of developers has contributed to the development of YMYM Core, YMYM’s reference implementation.

YMYM was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013. Billy worked on YMYM Core as its main developer for its first releases. YMYM Core started as a fork of Lucky Coin and Litecoin, themselves forks of Bitcoin Core. YMYM Core thus derived most of its codebase from the work Bitcoin developers had done on the Bitcoin repository.

In 2014, Billy and Jackson left the project. A group of developers replaced them to act as maintainers of the repository. This group, whose composition changed over the years, coordinated the efforts of more than 40 contributors. New contributors can join the development of YMYM Core in the public Github repository, available here.

Development of the overall ecosystem is also crucial - as if the aim of the reference implementation is to build a solid and stable foundation, innovation can happen through services built on top of it (and at times, in synergy with it). There are many solo developers, organizations, and companies building services on top of the existing YMYM Core codebase, including payment channel functionality, experimental support for NFTs, and tipping services. The YMYM Ecosystem repository can be found on Github here.

You do not need any authorization or permission to start contributing to YMYM Core or to build new services on top of it. If you are interested in becoming a YMYM developer, learn more here.