The Bitcoin Core development team has elevated the anonymous developer TheCharlatan to the maintainer of Trusted Keys.

A Bitcoin Core maintainer has for the first time expanded the number of trusted key holders with main commit access to the Bitcoin Core software, per a Protos report dated January 12. On January 8, 2026, pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan (also known as “sedited”) officially joined as the sixth member of the group, joining existing key holders Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow. Of the 25 members in Bitcoin Core’s GitHub development community, only these six PGP keys currently hold recognized commit access. At least 20 core contributors endorsed TheCharlatan’s promotion during group discussions. The nomination cited: “He’s a reliable code reviewer, has made substantial contributions to critical codebase areas, handles user and developer code releases carefully, and deeply understands the technical consensus process” — with no objections raised. TheCharlatan holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Zurich, is a South African developer, and primarily focuses on software reproducibility and research into Bitcoin Core’s validation logic. Reproducible builds ensure the process from source code to binary code includes independently verifiable steps. Additionally, his validation logic work builds on Carl Dong’s contributions to the Bitcoin Core kernel library, aiming to decouple the validation and non-validation logic required to check if a given block extends the current best-work chain.