Bitcoin Core Appoints 6th Core Maintainer in Three Years

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Golem (@golemweb3)

On January 8, the Bitcoin Core team removed developer TheCharlatan (X:@sedited) promoted to core maintainer, becoming the sixth member to hold a trusted key. The other five core maintainers who hold trusted keys include: Marco Falke (promoted in 2016), Gloria Zhao (promoted in 2022), Ryan Ofsky (promoted in 2023), Hennadii Stepanov (promoted in 2021), and Ava Chow (promoted in 2021).

This appointment marks the first addition of a trusted keyholder since 2023. Over the past decade, only 13 individuals have been granted this authority, highlighting its significance and the rigorous selection process involved.

Bitcoin Core is currently the primary development and maintenance team for the Bitcoin mainnet. It is responsible for writing, maintaining, testing, and releasing the set of full-node software, along with supporting tools and documentation, that are widely used. Bitcoin Core is not-for-profit and primarily relies on funding from external companies to operate.

The Bitcoin Core development team consists of 41 members who contribute the majority of the project's code. Among them, only six developers have been granted the title of "Maintainer"—they are currently the only six individuals worldwide who have the authority to merge code into Bitcoin Core and to sign the released binary files.

Six core maintainer signatures

An analogy can be made: Bitcoin Core core maintainers are like the "editors" for Bitcoin network developers. Anyone can contribute code and submit PRs (pull requests), but only the core maintainers have the authority to merge code into the official repository and sign releases. This is similar to how editors review submissions, deciding whether a developer's code will be accepted and published or sent back for revisions.

The signatures of Bitcoin Core's core maintainers ensure security, allowing all nodes and users to be confident that this is an "official and unaltered" release.But Bitcoin Core core maintainers do not have the authority to directly trigger changes in on-chain rules.For example, Bitcoin Core core maintainers have signed and released program files indicating that the Bitcoin network will undergo a soft fork or hard fork. However, whether the upgrade is actually successful still depends on adoption and consensus by users and miners, rather than being determined solely by the signatures of Bitcoin Core core maintainers.

When Bitcoin was first created, Satoshi Nakamoto was the sole core maintainer and had exclusive authority to modify the core codebase. Later, Satoshi passed this privilege to Gavin Andresen, and subsequently to Wladimir van der Laan. This means that for a long period, the power to maintain and modify the Bitcoin network's code rested in the hands of a single individual. It wasn't until 2022 that Wladimir van der Laan stepped down and became involved in a lawsuit with Craig Wright (who claims to be Satoshi), that this power began to be decentralized.

However, even so, Bitcoin Core core maintainers still play an important role today. Those who become core maintainers usually have high trust and reputation within the community or have made outstanding contributions to the Bitcoin network.

As one of the core maintainers, Ava Chow is a transgender female developer. In 2024, when one of the Bitcoin Core developers, Luke Dashjr, wanted to restrict Ordinals transactions at the consensus level, it was she who rejected Luke Dashjr's PR on the grounds that it was "non-consensus-driven and created noise," preventing a potential major Bitcoin network consensus split and becoming a behind-the-scenes hero.

Ava Chow attended the Bitcoin 2024 event.

For introductions and contributions of other core maintainers, please refer to the previous article.(See also:Who is Safeguarding Satoshi's Legacy? A Look at the 41-Person Group Behind Bitcoin's Trillion-Dollar Market Cap)Next, we will introduce why TheCharlatan can become the 6th core maintainer.

TheCharlatan graduated from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Zurich. A South African national, he specializes in reproducibility and the validation logic of Bitcoin Core. In a paper published in 2024, he...Blogclaimed that he has been developing this project for over two years. TheCharlatan's work systematically splits, organizes, and modularizes Bitcoin Core's validation logic, allowing other users to safely reuse it.

TheCharlatan

TheCharlatan is well-regarded among Bitcoin Core core developers, and at least 20 members agreed during the promotion process to make him a core maintainer. glozow praised him during the nomination, saying, "He is a reliable reviewer with extensive experience in key areas of the codebase, who thoughtfully considers what we deliver to users and developers, and has a strong understanding of the technical consensus process."

Bitcoin Core Core Developer Group Chat Content (Translated)

According to itGitHub account informationTheCharlatan first engaged in cryptocurrency development in 2015, creating a cryptocurrency price tracking tool. This tool was a simple Linux desktop widget with built-in price alert functionality that could trigger notifications when preset thresholds were reached. After 2017, his cryptocurrency-related development activities became more frequent.TheCharlatan began officially contributing code to Bitcoin Core in 2018, so it can be inferred that their first contact with Bitcoin Core was about 8 years ago, making them a veteran in this field.

It is also worth noting that during 2021-2022, TheCharlatan contributed to the codebase of a Farcaster project. This project enabled people to exchange Bitcoin and Monero in a peer-to-peer manner with anyone running a Farcaster node.

TheCharlatan was indeed particularly fond of Monero, having previously studied in 2020 the potential issues that transferring Monero using a hardware wallet might cause.Destroy the problem, as well as an exploration of Monero'sTime lock vulnerability.

Of course, real tech geeks can often be somewhat unpredictable. TheCharlatan frequently retweets other technical posts on X, but rarely shares their own opinions (as of May 2025).Post an article(He claimed to dislike NFTs even more), but starting from June 2025, he began repeating a tweet every month with the content "Cash on the internet. No auto-updates."

I was afraid that this might be some kind of jargon among Bitcoin technology geeks, or a cultural slogan that I'm not familiar with, so I asked an AI to help me explain the meaning of these two sentences. The AI said that these two sentences actually express a very extreme Bitcoin fundamentalist viewpoint:

"True internet-native cash should be as simple, direct, and tamper-proof as physical cash. Once you start implementing automatic upgrades, governance voting, or frequently changing rules, it's no longer cash—it becomes another centralized or semi-centralized, manipulable 'digital bank account.'"