How can a Monero enthusiast become a "gatekeeper" of Bitcoin?

Author: Golem

Original Title: For the first time in three years, the 6th Trusted Key holder for Bitcoin Core is born

On January 8th, the Bitcoin Core team promoted developer TheCharlatan (X: @sedited) to a Trusted Key holder, making him the sixth member with a Trusted Key. The other five Trusted Key holders include: Marco Falke (promoted in 2016), Gloria Zhao (promoted in 2022), Ryan Ofsky (promoted in 2023), Hennadii Stepanov (promoted in 2021), and Ava Chow (promoted in 2021).

This appointment marks the first new Trusted Key holder since 2023. Over the past decade, only 13 people have held this privilege, highlighting its importance and the strictness of the selection process.

Bitcoin Core Trusted Maintainers: The “Editors” of Bitcoin Developers

Bitcoin Core is currently the main development and maintenance team for the Bitcoin mainnet. It is responsible for writing, maintaining, testing, and releasing the majority of full node software, along with supporting tools and documentation. Bitcoin Core is non-profit; its operation mainly relies on external company funding.

The Bitcoin Core development team consists of 41 members, who contribute the vast majority of the code. Among them, only 6 developers have been granted the title of “Maintainer” — they are the only six people worldwide authorized to merge code into Bitcoin Core and sign the released binary files.

Six Core Maintainers’ Signatures

To make an analogy, Bitcoin Core’s core maintainers are like the “editors” of Bitcoin network development; anyone can contribute code and submit PRs to the codebase, but only the core maintainers have the authority to merge code into the official repository and sign off on releases. It’s similar to editors reviewing submissions, deciding whether developers’ code is accepted for release or sent back for modifications.

The signatures of Bitcoin Core core maintainers guarantee security, reassuring all nodes and users that the release is “official and unaltered.” However, Bitcoin Core core maintainers do not have the power to directly trigger on-chain protocol changes. For example, they can sign and release software that enables soft forks or hard forks, but whether the upgrade is successful still depends on user and miner adoption and consensus, not solely on the signatures of core maintainers.

When Bitcoin was first created, Satoshi Nakamoto was the sole core maintainer, with the exclusive right to modify the core codebase. Later, Satoshi transferred this privilege to Gavin Andresen, and then it was passed to Wladimir van der Laan. For a long time, the power to maintain and modify Bitcoin’s code was concentrated in one person. It wasn’t until 2022, when Wladimir van der Laan stepped down and became involved in a lawsuit with Craig Wright (who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto), that this power began to decentralize.

Nevertheless, even now, Bitcoin Core core maintainers remain an important role. Those who become core maintainers generally enjoy high trust and reputation within the community or have made significant contributions to the Bitcoin network.

For example, Ava Chow, one of the core maintainers, is a transgender female developer. When Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr attempted to impose restrictions on Ordinals transactions at the consensus layer in 2024, it was Ava Chow who, citing “lack of consensus and noise,” rejected Luke Dashjr’s PR, preventing a potential serious split in Bitcoin network consensus, acting as a behind-the-scenes hero.

Ava Chow attended Bitcoin 2024

For information about other core maintainers’ contributions, see previous articles (Related reading: Who is guarding Satoshi’s legacy? A look into the 41-person team behind Bitcoin’s trillion-dollar market cap). Next, we will explore why TheCharlatan was able to become the 6th core maintainer.

TheCharlatan: A Decade of Cryptocurrency Development Experience

TheCharlatan graduated from the University of Zurich with a degree in Computer Science. He is from South Africa and focuses on reproducibility and verification logic in Bitcoin Core. In a blog post in 2024, he claimed to have been working on this project for over two years. His work involves systematically breaking down, organizing, and modularizing Bitcoin Core’s verification logic, enabling other users to reuse it safely.

TheCharlatan

TheCharlatan is well-liked among Bitcoin Core developers. During his promotion to core maintainer, at least 20 members expressed their support. glozow praised him during his nomination: “He is a reliable reviewer with extensive experience in critical areas of the codebase, thoughtful about what we deliver to users and developers, and very familiar with the technical consensus process.”

Bitcoin Core Developer Group Chat Content (translated)

According to his Github profile, TheCharlatan first engaged in cryptocurrency development in 2015, creating a simple Linux desktop widget for displaying cryptocurrency prices, with built-in alerts that trigger at set thresholds. After 2017, his activity in crypto development increased significantly, and he began contributing to Bitcoin Core in 2018. It can be inferred that he first encountered Bitcoin Core about 8 years ago, making him a veteran.

It’s also worth noting that between 2021 and 2022, TheCharlatan contributed to a Farcaster project’s codebase. This project allows users to exchange Bitcoin and Monero peer-to-peer with anyone running a Farcaster node.

TheCharlatan has a particular fondness for Monero. In 2020, he researched issues related to destroying Monero when transferring via hardware wallets and explored vulnerabilities related to Monero’s time-locks.

Of course, true tech geeks might find some of this hard to grasp. TheCharlatan often retweets other technical tweets on X but rarely shares his own opinions (in May 2025, he posted that he disliked NFTs more). Since June 2025, he has been repeatedly posting a tweet every month with the content: “Cash on the internet. No auto-updates.”

I’m worried this might be some kind of cryptic language among Bitcoin tech geeks, or a cultural slogan I don’t understand, so I asked AI to help explain the meaning of these two sentences. AI says these two sentences actually express a very extreme Bitcoin fundamentalist view:

“Real internet-native cash should be as simple and straightforward as cash, unalterable. Once you start with auto-upgrades, governance votes, and frequent rule changes, it’s no longer cash, but becomes another centralized/semi-centralized/manipulable ‘digital bank account’.”