Bitcoin Core development team promotes anonymous developer TheCharlatan to Trusted Keys maintainer

BlockBeats News, January 12, according to protos, for the first time, Bitcoin Core maintainers have increased the number of trusted key holders with commit access to the main branch of the Bitcoin Core software.

On January 8, 2026, the pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan (also known as "sedited") officially joined, becoming the sixth member after the existing five key holders. TheCharlatan will share the responsibilities of trusted key holder with Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow. Among the 25 members of the Bitcoin Core software GitHub development community, only these six PGP keys with commit access are currently recognized.

In a group discussion with other core contributors, at least 20 members supported TheCharlatan's promotion to trusted key holder. The statement for his nomination—"He is a reliable code reviewer, has made in-depth contributions to critical areas of the codebase, is cautious about code released to users and developers, and has a deep understanding of the technical consensus process"—received no objections.

TheCharlatan graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in Computer Science and is a South African developer mainly focused on software reproducibility and research on Bitcoin Core's validation logic. In the field of software development, reproducible builds ensure that the transformation path from source code to binary code is independently verifiable. In addition, his work on validation logic continues Carl Dong's contributions to the Bitcoin Core kernel library, aiming to decouple the validation and non-validation logic required to determine whether a specific block extends the current best work chain.