On January 12, according to protos, Bitcoin Core maintainers increased the number of trusted key holders with commit permissions to the Bitcoin Core software main branch for the first time.
On January 8, 2026, the pseudonym developer TheCharlatan (also known as "sedited") officially joined, becoming the sixth member after the existing five key holders. TheCharlatan will share the responsibilities of a trusted key holder with Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow. Currently, only these six PGP keys with commit permissions are recognized among the 25 members of the Bitcoin Core software's GitHub development community.
In group discussions with other core contributors, at least 20 members endorsed TheCharlatan's nomination as a trusted key holder. The description of his nomination—"He is a reliable code reviewer with in-depth contributions to key areas of the codebase, treats code released to users and developers with care, and has a deep understanding of technical consensus processes"—was met with no objection.
TheCharlatan, a South African developer with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Zurich, primarily focuses on software reproducibility and verification logic in Bitcoin Core. In software development, reproducible builds ensure the independent verifiability of the transformation path from source code to binary code. Furthermore, his work on verification logic continues Carl Dong's contributions to the Bitcoin Core kernel library, aiming to decouple the verification and non-verification logic required to determine whether a particular block should extend the current best-effort chain of work.
