Week 1: Interacting with a Bitcoin Node

Learning to use Bitcoin Core’s RPC to interact with a running Bitcoin node, creating and broadcasting transactions.

Week 2: Building a P2SH-P2WSH Multisig Transaction

Creating signed P2SH-P2WSH multisig transactions, calculating sighashes, and computing ECDSA signatures.

Week 3: Mining First Block

Simulating the mining process, validating transactions, and successfully mining them into a block.

Week 4: Parsing a Descriptor

Generating addresses from descriptors and calculating total balances by fetching transaction data from Esplora.

**My experience with the Challenges :
** I was simultaneously working for my internship and had my mid sem examination around the corner. So I rushed and completed all the 4 challenges within a week .
But later , keeping in mind about everyone’s examination, SOB team decided to make the 4th challenge optional.

Organization Selection and Proposal Process

After completing the challenges, the proposal round began. I started to look at the past year organizations. I found Coinswap to be very interesting. I started contributing to the Coinswap before proposal round began.

Although the initial list of participating organizations dropped on March 16, new additions continued rolling in through the end of the month. Once everything was finalized, I drafted two proposals for Coinswap and one for Galoy.

Why I chose Galoy and Coinswap:

I was already familiar with the Coinswap codebase and had contributed to it, so I decided to draft two proposals for that project.

As Galoy participated quite late, so I didn’t have the same head start with their codebase. However, one of their DevOps-focused problem statements immediately caught my attention — it involved AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Helm, all technologies I’d been eager to learn to kick off my DevOps journey alongside blockchain. To prepare, I dove into those tools and studied every available resource and relevant code before tackling the competency test and writing my proposal.

First for the competency test and for the proposal itself, I thoroughly studied all available resources and the codebase.

Result :

The results came out on May 5, right in the middle of my end-semester exams, and It started off being quite heartbreaking: both of my Coinswap proposals were listed as second choices. That meant I’d only get in if someone ahead of me dropped out — but I was so certain that wouldn’t happen. It felt like “so close, yet so far” lol. The SoB team said they’d let me know by May 9 if anything changed, but of course, nothing did, so I missed out on Coinswap.

Now, you must be wondering what’s about Galoy…yes Galoy delayed the result by over a week. They announced their result on may of 12th. I was almost out of hope and expecting nothing .

But guess what , BOOM my proposal got accepted and I got selected in Galoy…

Final Result:

I’m happy to announce that my proposal for the Summer of Bitcoin program was accepted. Over the next 12 weeks, I’ll be working closely with the Galoy team to build the AWS infrastructure.

My Summer of Bitcoin acceptance email

My Project: Extending Galoy-Infra to Support AWS

I’ll be working on extending the existing Galoy-Infra Terraform codebase with dedicated AWS modules, enabling a full, turnkey deployment of the Galoy Bitcoin banking stack on Amazon Web Services.

Expected Outcomes

• Terraform code to deploy Galoy Infrastructure on AWS
• Kubernetes Ingress exposed to an external IP address on AWS
• Restricted IAM permissions for service accounts and users
• Bastion host access configured with 2FA
• Terraform state stored securely in an S3 bucket
• Documentation mirroring GCP implementation for AWS-specific setup
• CI pipeline with Concourse to automate our build, test, and deployment workflows.

Skills Required

• AWS (EC2, EKS, IAM, VPC)
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• Git for version control
• Helm

This opportunity will allow me to:

• Gain hands-on experience designing and managing Bitcoin banking infrastructure.
• Contribute to a real-world project with real users
• Work closely with experienced mentors like Kartik.
• Further develop my technical and collaboration skills

Proposals:

Link to my selected Proposal forGaloy:Extending Galoy-Infra to Support AWS

If you’d like to check out my other proposal for Coinswap which couldn’t make it (But definitely check out the accepted ones for Coinswap):

• Wallet Encryption and Backup Mechanism
• Fix taker Private Key Handover Exploit

Advice for Future Applicants:

If you’re planning to apply to Summer of Bitcoin in the future, here are some pointers from my experience:

• Begin early and build a strong grasp of Bitcoin fundamentals
• Actively contribute to the organization you’re targeting
• Keep communication channels open with potential mentors
• Aim for impactful, high-quality contributions over sheer volume
• Prepare a comprehensive, well-structured proposal