BlockBeats news: On January 12, according to a report by protos, Bitcoin Core maintainers have, for the first time, increased the number of trusted key holders with commit access to the main branch of the Bitcoin Core software.
On January 8, 2026, pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan (also known as "sedited") officially joined as the sixth member, following the existing five keyholders. TheCharlatan will share the responsibilities of trusted keyholder with Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow. Among the 25 members of the Bitcoin Core software's GitHub development community, only these six PGP keys with commit privileges are currently recognized.
In discussions with the group of core contributors, at least 20 members supported TheCharlatan's promotion to a trusted keyholder. The nomination statement—describing him as "a reliable code reviewer with deep contributions in key areas of the codebase, who carefully handles code released to users and developers, and who has a strong understanding of technical consensus processes"—was uncontested.
TheCharlatan, a South African developer who graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in computer science, primarily focuses on software reproducibility and the validation logic of Bitcoin Core. In the field of software development, reproducible builds ensure that the transformation path from source code to binary code is independently verifiable. Additionally, his work on validation logic continues the contributions of Carl Dong to the kernel library of Bitcoin Core, aiming to decouple the validation and non-validation logic required to determine whether a specific block extends the current best work chain.