Bitcoin Core expands trusted maintainer set with sixth keyholder
Bitcoin Core adds sixth trusted maintainer as ‘TheCharlatan’ gains commit key.
- Bitcoin Core added pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan as the sixth Trusted Key holder with direct commit access to the master branch.
- The promotion follows strong backing from Core contributors and reflects ongoing efforts to decentralize control that began after Satoshi’s handover to Gavin Andresen and later Wladimir van der Laan.
- TheCharlatan focuses on reproducible builds and validation logic, extending prior work to separate validating from non-validating code in Bitcoin’s kernel library.
Bitcoin Core maintainers have expanded the number of developers holding Trusted Keys with commit power to the master branch of the Bitcoin Core software for the first time since May 2023, according to community records.
Bitcoin Core contributor developments
On January 8, 2026, a pseudonymous developer known as TheCharlatan, also referred to as “sedited,” became the sixth keyholder, joining Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow.
The group of Trusted Key holders has evolved over the past decade. Falke gained access in 2016, Samuel Dobson in 2018 before exiting by 2022, Stepanov in 2021, Chow in 2021, Zhao in 2022, and Ofsky in 2023, according to Bitcoin Core development records.
Bitcoin (BTC) developers sign software updates with their PGP keys. The 25 members of the GitHub development community for Bitcoin Core software recognize only these six PGP keys with commit access.
In a group discussion among Core contributors, at least 20 members supported TheCharlatan’s promotion to Trusted Keys status, with no objections recorded. The nomination stated: “He is a reliable reviewer who has worked extensively in critical areas of the codebase, thinks carefully about what we ship to users and developers, and understands the technical consensus process well.”
TheCharlatan, a University of Zurich computer science graduate from South Africa, focuses on reproducibility and Bitcoin Core’s validation logic, according to his development profile. Reproducible builds in software development ensure an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code. TheCharlatan’s work on validation logic extends the efforts of Carl Dong on the Bitcoin Core kernel library to separate validating and non-validating logic required to determine if a given block extends the current best-work chain.
When Bitcoin launched in 2009, only Satoshi Nakamoto possessed commit-level access to the Bitcoin project software. Nakamoto transferred key privileges to Gavin Andresen, who subsequently passed control to Wladimir van der Laan. Van der Laan later led an initiative to decentralize control of commit keys to a group, following legal threats from Craig Wright, who lost multi-year court battles against Core developers over copyright to Bitcoin’s whitepaper. That decentralization effort established the current structure in Core development, where six people serve as Lead Maintainers.
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