- TheCharlatan (also known as sedited) was added to Bitcoin Core’s Trusted Keys on January 8, 2026.
- The move raises the number of PGP keys with Commit access on the master branch to six.
- The six Trusted Key holders are Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, Ava Chow, and TheCharlatan.
- The Bitcoin Core GitHub development group recognizes only these six keys for commit signing; see the list of members and GitHub’s Commit signature process.
- TheCharlatan is a University of Zurich graduate from South Africa who works on reproducible builds and validation logic; his kernel work is available here.
On January 8, 2026, the Bitcoin Core repository updated its list of Trusted Keys to add developer TheCharlatan, giving him Commit power on the master branch. The change appears in the repository history for the Trusted Keys file (commit log).
The new Trusted Key set now includes six people: Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, Ava Chow, and TheCharlatan. The Bitcoin Core development group on GitHub recognizes only these six PGP keys for commit signing; see the project’s members and GitHub’s documentation on Commit signature verification.
Core contributors discussed the nomination in a group chat, and at least 20 members supported the promotion with no objections to the nomination language. In that chat, the nomination described him as: “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.” The chat record is available publicly (group chat post).
TheCharlatan is a South African graduate of the University of Zurich. He focuses on reproducible builds — a process that lets others verify that compiled software matches source code — and on Bitcoin Core’s validation logic, which separates code that checks block validity from other functions. His work on the kernel library builds on efforts by Carl Dong and is available online.
Historically, commit-level control began with Satoshi Nakamoto, who passed access to Gavin Andresen, and then to Wladimir van der Laan. After legal threats from Craig Wright, the project moved to a distributed model with multiple Trusted Keys. Previous additions to the Trusted Keys list include Falke (2016), Samuel Dobson (added 2018, later exited in 2022), Stepanov (2021), Chow (2021), Zhao (2022), and Ofsky (2023).
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