One of bitcoins biggest investments finally paying off

Bitcoin appears to finally be making headway with one of its less-appreciated, but critical challenges: recruitment.

Simply put, the number of developers contributing to the cryptocurrency's open-source code is suddenly on the rise. Sure enough, there have been at least 21 code submissions approved from new contributors over the past 50 days - and that's no small feat given developers have struggled for years to entice new coders to work on the project.

And while the number of merges over the nearly two-month period didn't jump up drastically, seeing new names within the Github repository is a welcome sight given that most of the hundreds of contributions to bitcoin over the past several years have been coded by a few dozen veterans.

According to several developers CoinDesk interviewed, there isn't a direct correlation they can point to explain the increase, though there are likely contributors. Indeed, for some it's a strong sign serious investments of time and effort in training and academic programs are finally paying off.

"Many educational and training efforts have lately helped to introduce new developers to Bitcoin Core and the bitcoin software ecosystem," Ferdinando Ametrano, a professor at Politecnico di Milano who has served as a program director at bitcoin developer conferences, told CoinDesk.