Inside Bitcoin Development Kit with Steve Myers

Most Bitcoiners first hear about the orange coin through price spikes or loud arguments online. Steve Myers found it differently. Back in his enterprise software job in Los Angeles, he stumbled across an article on a nerdy news site.

At the time, people were running SETI@home, donating spare computer power to hunt for signals in space. Bitcoin struck him as the same concept, but for money. As he put it:

That spark led him years later to help build Bitcoin Development Kit, or BDK, a library that handles the tough parts of wallet creation so others can focus on the rest.

Steve Myers started with a failed side project alongside his brother, a mobile app for direct bitcoin trades between users. It never launched, but the experience showed a clear gap.

Options like BitcoinJ worked for Android but not iOS. Building for both meant starting over each time. Myers turned to Rust, found the rust-bitcoin project, and began work on a wallet library.

He even landed a grant from Spiral to go full time. Then Steve Lee introduced him to Alekos Filini, who had already built something far ahead thanks in part to his work on Blockstream’s Green wallet library.

“Steve Lee introduced me to Alekos, who was essentially doing the same thing but much better. He had made a much more advanced library. So I threw away what I was working on and just joined him, and that became the beginnings of Bitcoin Dev Kit.”

Filini supplied the initial code for the project and Myers supplied the new name. Magical Bitcoin then became BDK about five years ago. BDK gives developers ready tools for key management, transaction building, coin selection, and syncing with the blockchain through Electrum, Esplora, full nodes, or compact block filters.

It supports single signature setups, multisig, timelocks, and other spending rules via descriptors and Miniscript.

Myers sums up the goal clearly, “Anything that is like a BIP or supported by Bitcoin Core, that is our goal, to provide that, in an easy to use library that people can integrate into their projects.”

The library is written in Rust for safety, but bindings let developers use it from Kotlin, Swift, Python, and more. That is ideal for mobile or desktop apps without rewriting core logic.

Early funding came through individual grants, with Spiral as a major backer. They encouraged the team to form an independent organization. Myers set up the Bitcoin Dev Kit Foundation, first as a 501(c)(3), then switching to a 501(c)(6) after IRS input, so it matched a trade group model that fit the mission better.

On Spiral’s philosophy, he notes:

The five person board includes Steve Myers, Alekos Filini, Lloyd Fournier, Steve Lee from Spiral, and Tobin Harding.

Sponsors include Spiral, whose Bitkey wallet uses BDK, Proton with Proton Wallet, CleanSpark, and AnchorWatch. Many projects adopt BDK quietly.

Known users include

Myers liked One Swiss Bank’s example because their developer simply built a proof of reserves module on top of BDK and maintained it themselves, a clean example of free software in action.

Myers sees more layer 2 interest ahead. LDK Node uses BDK for on chain parts. Projects like Bark for ARK and various eCash setups tap into it as well. “I do think these are going to be pretty crucial to the growth and success of Bitcoin,” he says.

Nostr excites him as a coordination tool beyond social feeds. He imagines encrypted metadata sharing for wallets, replacing iCloud or Google sync for things like labels and Lightning data.

“I could definitely see using it as a communication layer between your Bitcoin wallets,” he says, especially in combination with newer private group messaging tools on Nostr.

On AI, Steve Myers stays practical. It helps with basic Rust roadblocks, not the hard new pieces like their compact block filter module.

“Rust is a complicated language. It has some fairly hairy edge case errors you might have to deal with, and I use AI all the time to answer those basic questions,” he says. But for brand new work, “when you are just building something that has not been built before, which is a lot of what our team is doing, you use it differently.”

Instead, the team improves documentation so AI can guide newcomers without hallucinating. They are working on a tutorial book, inline code examples that actually compile, and binding specific guides, all aimed at making BDK easier to use in any language. Many questions they get are not even about BDK itself but Bitcoin basics.

“A lot of the questions we get are not necessarily about how to do it with BDK, but just the core concepts like what is a descriptor, or what does it mean when I am syncing my wallet using Electrum,” he says.

If he could ask Satoshi one question, Steve Myers would go straight to the long term. He would ask, “What does he think is going to happen at the end of the mining reward?”

No one has seen a true fixed supply money before. Myers expects big changes for miners relying only on fees and for how people use the base chain. It is likely that the people doing an on-chain transaction that far in the future, will be like sending UTXOs worth millions or billions of dollars in value.

It will be much more rare and that’s why BDK is pushing better support for layer 2s, as Steve noted, “That’s one of the communities we've seen coming and using BDK.”

Most users never touch BDK code. Yet it helps make wallets safer, more private, and quicker to build, letting teams ship real products instead of reinventing Bitcoin plumbing from scratch.

For hobbyists or founders, Steve Myers keeps the advice simple. Start with the docs, ask questions on Discord, and let Bitcoin Development Kit carry the heavy load in the background.