Susan Githaiga Just Became the First African to Land Code in Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Firmware
Ten Lines of Code, One Significant First
On August 31, 2026, Mujina maintainer Ryan Kuester merged a pull request from Kenyan developer Susan Githaiga that replaced an external software library with two inline CRC functions of about ten lines each. The change was small. What it represents is not. Dada Devs, the programme where Githaiga trained, confirmed on October 9 that she is the first African contributor to the 256 Foundation’s Mujina mining firmware project.
Mujina is open-source Rust firmware released under the GPL, designed to run hashboards from any vendor with no developer fee. It exists because the firmware on nearly every Bitcoin mining machine shipping today is closed. Miners cannot verify whether it is skimming hashrate, phoning home to a licence server, or doing anything else they did not agree to. Mujina replaces that with code anyone can read, audit, and contribute to.
What She Actually Changed
Githaiga’s pull request removed a dependency on an external library called crc_all and replaced it with two short functions written directly into Mujina’s codebase. She tested her replacement code against the old library and confirmed identical results. The fix closed one of the clean-up tasks the project had listed after auditing its external dependencies, part of how Mujina guards its software supply chain. When an attack hit the Rust ecosystem through the arrayref library in August, Mujina was able to confirm it was unaffected because of exactly this kind of housekeeping.
On October 1, the 256 Foundation extended Mujina’s funding through December 2026, naming Githaiga among five people who landed code during the term, most of them for the first time.
From Dada Devs to Bitcoin Core Infrastructure
Githaiga trained through Dada Devs, founded by Lorraine Marcel, which calls itself the home of Africa’s first generation of female Bitcoin developers. The programme trains African women engineers with a focus on real commits and pull requests, not just theory. Githaiga is one of several Dada Devs alumni whose code now appears in Bitcoin projects: Mercy Mbao has contributions in Bitcoin Core, Wandia Mugo built PayWithSats and contributes to Lightning, and Busayo Dada works on NodeGaze, a monitoring platform for Lightning node operators.
The pipeline from education to contribution is working. An African woman trained through a programme designed for African women has shipped code into Bitcoin mining infrastructure used by miners globally. That is not a talking point. It is a merged pull request.