On April 22-23, the MIT Bitcoin Club hosted the 10th MIT Bitcoin Expo. DCI director Neha Narula gave a keynote speech, Cryptoeconomic Systems managing editor Reuben Youngblom presented a talk titled "The 70 Megaton Gorilla: Addressing the PoW climate narrative," and DCI software engineer Sam Stuewe presented an asynchronous talk titled "Are We CBDC Yet? A Healthy Dose of Skepticism." Sam also mentored participants in the Expo's Hackathon.

We’re excited to share that AJ Towns is joining the Digital Currency Initiative to lead our Bitcoin Software and Security Effort (please find his announcement below). This four-year research and development program is designed to continue to harden the Bitcoin network and steward the industry’s commitment to funding open source software. The effort will include contributing to Bitcoin Core development as well as longer-term research, such as investigations into the stability of rewards and software to provide strong robustness and correctness guarantees. It will also include attracting talent in network and operating system security, compilers, programming languages, testing, and more to join the effort.