Bitcoin Core adds new maintainer: sedited

sedited, aka TheCharlatan, is officially the latest bitcoin core maintainer

Jan 10, 2026

Long time bitcoin contributor, sedited aka TheCharlatan, was officially nominated as a core maintainer for the bitcoin/bitcoin project this past Thursday, Jan 8, 2026 during the regular bitcoin-core-dev IRC meeting, and officially added to the trusted-keys file yesterday, Friday Jan 9th, granting him permission to sign commits for bitcoin-core. IRC meeting logs of his nomination follow.

16:19 <fjahr> #topic maintainer nomination (glozow)
16:20 <glozow> I’m nominating TheCharlatan aka sedited to be a maintainer. 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.
16:20 <glozow> I’ve spoken with him and the other maintainers already, and hope that the rest of you agree he is well-suited for the role. Please speak freely with your concerns and/or support.
16:20 <achow101> ack
16:20 <dergoegge> ack
16:20 <marcofleon> ack
16:20 <hebasto> ack
16:20 <brunoerg> ack
16:20 <sliv3r__-> ack
16:20 <pinheadmz> ack
16:20 <sipa> ack
16:20 <instagibbs> ack
16:21 <l0rinc> ACK
16:21 <furszy> ack TheCharlatan, I don’t know sedited enough yet.
16:21 <fjahr> ack, but I guess there will be an issue as well like last time?
16:21 <lightlike> ack
16:21 <andrewtoth> ack
16:21 <hodlinator> ack
16:21 <janb84> ack
16:21 <yancy> ack
16:21 <stickies-v> ack
16:21 <glozow> The next step would be for him to open a PR to add his key to trusted-keys
16:21 <darosior> Ack. To add to that i agree especially with the part of him having a project-wide view and his care for what we ship to users.
16:22 <maxedw> ack
16:23 <glozow> sedited: do you want to add anything? :)
16:23 <sedited> ty, fjahr do you have that issue number?
16:23 <abubakarsadiq> ACK
16:24 <fjahr> no, I meant that I think we opened an issue for discussion last time if I remember correctly and I asked if this is happening again.
16:24 <fjahr> But maybe that was also the PR already
16:24 <glozow> I don’t think we did an issue, just a PR
16:24 <achow101> just the pr
16:24 <darosior> Maybe you are referring to the thread of the PR where the last person added their key?
16:25 <fjahr> It’s not so relevant, I need to go back and look at it
16:25 <fjahr> It’s been a while
16:26 <fjahr> Anything else to add on this topic?
16:26 <maflcko> ack, sedited seems a great fit for the role
16:26 <glozow> I think that’s it. The rest can be on the PR

Who nominated sedited?

sedited was nominated by glozow aka Gloria Zhao, who herself was made a core maintainer at the June 30, 2022 bitcoin-core-dev meeting and nominated by fanquake (Michael Ford).

According to the IRC logs, glozow had already gotten the approval of the four other core maintainers before publicly proposing sedited as a new core maintainer.

sedited’s nomination was immediately greeted with unanimous approval from other attendees at the meeting, with darosior of Chaincode Labs detailing his approval of sedited’s “attention to what is being shipped to users.”

What does it mean to be a bitcoin ‘core maintainer’?

Anyone can propose changes to bitcoin by submitting a pull request to bitcoin/bitcoin on Github. Maintainers are the only accounts on the Github project that have the ability to sign commits for the project.

In other words, they’re the only ones who have the ability to make changes to the codebase that is shipped as bitcoin-core to users. They have a higher profile than other contributors as their approval and merges are what changes the code that is bitcoin.

sedited’s addition to the maintainer list brings the total number of maintainers to six: achow101, glozow, hebasto, fanquake, ryanofsky, and sedited.

Notably developers such as sipa (aka Pieter Wuille), while a prolific contributor to the bitcoin project, does not hold commit privileges, having stepped down as a core maintainer on July 7th, 2022 in response to growing public scrutiny to changes to bitcoin.

What has sedited contributed to bitcoin?

Following in Carl Dong’s footsteps, sedited has been involved in ushering in the long running work to encapsulate core consensus logic into a pluggable module, also known as the ‘libbitcoinkernel’ project.

sedited first contributed to bitcoin core in July 2018. In February 2023 Spiral, the Block bitcoin research and grant-giving arm, announced bringing him on as a grantee to work on the libbitcoinkernel project full-time. Since then he has been working on the libbitcoinkernel project, which shipped its first iteration in Bitcoin Core v30 this past October 2025.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?