MIT has announced the creation of a Bitcoin Developer Fund that aims to support the work of Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields – the three leading developers of the Bitcoin Core project, who joined MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative last year.

The fund has raised $900,000 getting support from companies including BitFury, Bitmain, Chain, Circle and Nasdaq. In addition, Jim Breyer, Founder and CEO of Breyer Capital; Jim Pallotta, chairman and managing director of the Raptor Group; Jeff Tarrant; venture capitalist Fred Wilson; and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have also backed the fund.

“The goal of the fund is to cover salaries, travel and overall support of Bitcoin protocol development efforts, including events like the Scaling Bitcoin workshop series”, said Brian Forde is Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab.

The fund will not be used to pay for any administrative costs of the DCI, Forde added. The blog post further clarifies that the fund specifically applies to the development of code for the Bitcoin protocol. However, MIT said it is open to talking with other open-source cryptocurrency projects about developing a separate fund, depending on demand and potential sponsors. It also said that it is open to support another Bitcoin developer provided there is a “real demonstrated need”.

In addition, Forde also announced the creation of a wallet to accept bitcoin from donors of the fund after several donors offered to donate in the digital currency. However, the funds received in bitcoin are liquidated into US dollars.

The MIT Media Lab announced the launch of the Digital Currency Initiative in April last year. The initiative aims to bring together global experts in areas ranging from cryptography, to economics, to privacy, to distributed systems, to take on this important new area of research.