Bitcoin Core has a new maintainer. If you aren’t immersed in dev circles like most of us, or don’t know what that means, this article is for you.
On January 8th, Bitcoin developer sedited — also known as TheCharlatan — became Bitcoin Core’s sixth maintainer, the first new addition since May 2023. He joins fellow maintainers Michael Ford, Ava Chow, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, and Hennadii Stepanov.
If that’s news to you, you probably need some memory jogging on what that even means. So I’m here to help explain GitHub to you.
Luckily, I caught up with sedited to discuss how he got here, what he’s focused on, and what comes next for the Bitcoin Core project.
And you may find it shocking, but what he’s working on gets at the heart of a lot of the drama surrounding Bitcoin Core over the past year. It may even set the stage for some of the main Bitcoin narrative arcs over the coming decade.
Editor’s note: It is common for Bitcoin Core contributors to prefer pseudonymity. “sedited” also goes by the alias “TheCharlatan.” While some of his info and history are accessible publicly, we won’t publish that here.
What is a Bitcoin Core maintainer?
Bitcoin Core is the reference client for bitcoin, run by over 80% of the network, and maintainers are like janitors for this codebase.
The code lives on GitHub and is publicly available to everyone.
However, someone has to have the ability to merge new code into the official build, as well as perform regular “janitorial work” making sure coding discussion on the repository remains functional.
The maintainers are the ones with the keys to do these actions. It functions more like a hybrid moderator-janitor role than it is a gatekeeping one. But at the end of the day, someone has to have the keys. With the addition of sedited, there are now 6 Core maintainers.
Bitcoin’s new maintainer is focused on clarifying consensus
We asked sedited if he’d been trying to become a maintainer (it’s not exactly a job you apply for).
“It has not been a goal of mine since contributing to Bitcoin. I guess the work I’ve been doing puts me in a position that made me a candidate, just because it was touching some places of the code,” he told Blockspace.
That code is called “libbitcoinkernel” – a project to extract Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules into a standalone library.
“Consensus rules are the logic that determines whether a transaction or block is valid,” he continued. “They’re what makes Bitcoin, Bitcoin.”
Surprisingly, due to the complexity of the code it’s actually quite difficult to define what lines of code are critical for Bitcoin consensus and which lines of code are just functions of the client. It’s been a longtime project to separate the consensus-only code from the rest of Core.
“The kernel project isolates this code so other software can use it directly rather than reimplementing it from scratch,” sedited said.
“We can now actually, for the first time, clearly define what belongs to the consensus code and what doesn’t. We have a clear boundary of what actually belongs to it and what is kind of adjacent to it. That’s nice from a philosophical standpoint—these are the rules, and as long as you follow them, you should be fine.”
Libbitcoinkernel will make it easier to spin up new Bitcoin clients
There’s a practical motivation too. Historically, when developers build alternative Bitcoin node software, they have to reimplement consensus rules independently. This almost always introduces subtle discrepancies that could cause nodes to disagree about which blocks are valid.
An important distinction: a Bitcoin “client” is the software you run. But Bitcoin the network is not necessarily one specific client, it is the aggregate consensus of all the clients, regardless of what software you’re running.
Bitcoin Core is the most popular Bitcoin client with over 80% of nodes running Core, but Libbitcoin and Knots have also seen marginal adoption. These software clients each have different codes and quirks for how users interact with the Bitcoin network, but they all tick to the same internal clock, Bitcoin’s blockchain – so long as they are in consensus with the latest transaction rules.
Building a new Bitcoin client from scratch is a herculean task, which is why you have to be a bit insane to take on such a project. Sedited says “these kind of bugs are kind of unacceptable if we want to have a Bitcoin that’s actually successful as a money and can be relied upon.”
Sedited says that awareness of this consensus project and its status are low because “we’ve not done a good job at giving incremental updates on how things are progressing. That’s totally on us.”
However, the project is decently far along. Case-in-point: sedited has already built his own experimental node using the library.
“It runs fine. It can keep up with the network and has the exact same guarantees that Bitcoin Core gives you in terms of staying in consensus with everybody else on the network,” he said.
That said, Sedited wishes more people understood “the lengths we go through to vet our dependencies and guarantee reproducibility for the binaries we publish. That’s a really underappreciated aspect of what we’re trying to do.“
He’s particularly concerned about supply chain attacks – malicious code slipped into software dependencies that could activate years later.
“They can lie dormant for five, ten, twenty years until they actually activate. If we run into something like that, that would probably be a showstopper.”
Sedited has a long history working on problems like supply chain attacks. He discovered & responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in Coldcard, Trezors, Ledger Nano X, Keepkey. He’s also identified and disclosed vulnerabilities in Monero.
Bitcoin maintainer: An inglorious but necessary job
Being a maintainer comes with some social risk.
This past year maintainer Gloria Zhao was the subject of significant criticism and faced backlash over policy decisions some users call “spam.”
Sedited calls Gloria’s targeting “unwarranted.” Each maintainer has different approaches to public engagement, often for these reasons.
Sedited says he’ll probably keep a low profile.
“I’ll just continue doing what I’m doing—do a bit of public engagement, share my thoughts every now and then. But I don’t plan on going on any grand conference tours.”
As for what’s next for the Bitcoin Core project, Sedited says he’s excited about the potential of new clients coming out of his work on libbitcoinkernal.
“I’ve got a slightly different view towards alternative clients than many of my peer developers on Bitcoin Core. I would be totally fine with other alternative clients competing with us, hopefully reusing the kernel library to at least guarantee that they can stay in consensus with us.”
In my view this is a very interesting perspective, a bit unorthodox for longtime Core contributors. It’s a bit of an olive branch to people who are critical of Core, or hope to decrease the project’s dominant role in the Bitcoin technical world.
“I kind of welcome the competition,” he concluded.
Header image courtesy of @_pretyflaco.
Correction January 16, 2026 at 10:30am ET: Marco Falke was originally listed as one of the current Bitcoin Core maintainers, however he resigned in 2023. Michael Ford is one of the current six maintainers.
