Overview
- On January 8, 2026, the developer known as TheCharlatan (also “sedited”) received a PGP Trusted Key granting direct commit access to Bitcoin Core’s master branch.
- This is the first expansion of commit authority since May 2023, with only six PGP keys recognized among roughly 25 members of the project’s GitHub development community.
- At least 20 Bitcoin Core contributors supported the nomination in a group discussion, and no objections were recorded.
- The trusted maintainer set now consists of Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, Ava Chow, and TheCharlatan.
- TheCharlatan focuses on reproducible builds and validation logic, building on Carl Dong’s kernel-library work, and is profiled as a University of Zurich computer science graduate from South Africa.