Bitcoin Core promotes first Trusted Keys maintainer in three years

For the first time since May 2023, Bitcoin Core maintainers have increased the number of Trusted Keys possessing Commit power to the master branch of Bitcoin Core software.

On January 8, 2026, pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan, also known as “sedited,” joined the five other keyholders.

TheCharlatan joins Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow as the sixth Trusted Key holder.

Prior entrants to this elite group during the past decade were Falke in 2016, Samuel Dobson in 2018 (who then exited the group by 2022), Stepanov in 2021, Chow in 2021, Zhao in 2022, and Ofsky in 2023.

Bitcoin developers sign software updates with their PGP key. The 25 members of the GitHub development community for Bitcoin Core software recognize only these six PGP keys with Commit access.

In a group chat with other Core contributors, at least 20 members agreed with TheCharlatan’s promotion to Trusted Keys. No one objected to the language of his nomination: “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.”

Read more: EXCLUSIVE: Lawyers call Bitcoin Core v30 CSAM concerns ‘overblown’

Who is TheCharlatan?

A University of Zurich computer science graduate, TheCharlatan is South African and focuses on reproducibility as well as Bitcoin Core’s validation logic. 

In software development, reproducible builds ensure an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code. Second, 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 determine if a given block extends the current best-work chain.

At Bitcoin’s inception in 2009, only Satoshi Nakamoto possessed Commit-level access to the Bitcoin project software.

Nakamoto first passed his key privilege to Gavin Andresen, who then passed the baton to Wladimir van der Laan. 

Under dubious threats of legal action from Craig Wright, who ultimately lost his multi-year court battles against Core developers over copyright to Bitcoin’s whitepaper, van der Laan led an initiative to decentralize control of Commit keys to a group.

That initiative succeeded and remains the new norm in Core development today, where six people currently serve as Lead Maintainers.

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