Bitcoin marketplace startup Purse announced a multi-million dollar bitcoin protocol development agreement with Bitmain Technologies, Bitcoin.com, BIXIN (formerly HaoBTC), and F2Pool.

With the agreement, Purse will apply its customer-centric approach to ‘bcoin’, which is a full node implementation, in order to make bitcoin available to new developers. The company said that the funds will be utilized to hire new developers and cultivate a vibrant open source community to fosdter the protocol development.

“For bitcoin to take off, we need multiple implementations with even market share. Decentralizing protocol development will lead to multiple clients, diverse communities, more developers, better security, and more innovation,” Andrew Lee, CEO of Purse, stated.

‘bcoin’ was launched in September 2016 and has been embraced by the ecosystem including companies like BitPay, Ripio, BTC.com, and Decentraland. The software is open source and is free under the MIT license.

“We’re impressed with the team’s technical capability and professionalism. Further, they’ve already demonstrated ability execute and innovate,” Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain, stated.

The participants of the bitcoin protocol development agreement will be retaining full autonomy for the project and have not purchased an equity stake.