For the necessary time since May perchance well perchance also 2023, Bitcoin Core maintainers have elevated the different of Depended on Keys possessing Commit power to the master branch of Bitcoin Core system.
On January 8, 2026, pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan, is also named “sedited,” joined the five rather loads of keyholders.
TheCharlatan joins Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow as the sixth Depended on Key holder.
Prior entrants to this elite neighborhood one day of the past decade were Falke in 2016, Samuel Dobson in 2018 (who then exited the neighborhood by 2022), Stepanov in 2021, Chow in 2021, Zhao in 2022, and Ofsky in 2023.
Bitcoin developers ticket system updates with their PGP key. The 25 people of the GitHub model neighborhood for Bitcoin Core system agree with most gripping these six PGP keys with Commit access.
In a neighborhood chat with rather loads of Core contributors, no longer decrease than 20 people agreed with TheCharlatan’s promotion to Depended on Keys. Nobody objected to the language of his nomination: “He’s a legitimate reviewer who has worked broadly in serious areas of the codebase, thinks carefully about what we ship to users and developers, and understands the technical consensus path of well.”
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Who’s TheCharlatan?
A College of Zurich computer science graduate, TheCharlatan is South African and specializes in reproducibility as well to Bitcoin Core’s validation logic.
In system model, reproducible builds make sure an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code. 2nd, TheCharlatan’s work on validation logic extends the work of Carl Dong on the Bitcoin Core kernel library to de-spaghettify validating and non-validating logic required to resolve if a given block extends the fresh most gripping-work chain.
At Bitcoin’s inception in 2009, most gripping Satoshi Nakamoto possessed Commit-level access to the Bitcoin challenge system.
Nakamoto first handed his key privilege to Gavin Andresen, who then handed the baton to Wladimir van der Laan.
Below doubtful threats of supreme action from Craig Wright, who within the extinguish lost his multi-year court docket battles in opposition to Core developers over copyright to Bitcoin’s whitepaper, van der Laan led an initiative to decentralize retain a watch on of Commit keys to a neighborhood.
That initiative succeeded and remains the unique norm in Core model currently, where six folks currently befriend as Lead Maintainers.
