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

BlockBeats News, January 12th, according to protos report, for the first time, a Bitcoin Core maintainer has increased the number of trusted key holders with main commit access to the Bitcoin Core software.

On January 8, 2026, pseudonymous developer TheCharlatan (also known as 'sedited') officially joined as the sixth member, following the existing five key holders. TheCharlatan will share trusted key holder responsibilities with Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, and Ava Chow. Among the 25 members of the Bitcoin Core software's GitHub development community, only these six PGP keys are currently recognized as having commit access.

In group discussions with other core contributors, at least 20 members endorsed TheCharlatan's promotion to trusted key holder. The nomination was described as, "He is a reliable code reviewer, has made substantial contributions in critical areas of the codebase, handles code releases to users and developers with care, and has a deep understanding of the technical consensus process," with no objections raised.

TheCharlatan graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Zurich, is a South African developer, and primarily focuses on software reproducibility and research on Bitcoin Core's validation logic. In software development, reproducible builds ensure that the path from source code to binary code has independently verifiable steps. Furthermore, his work in validation logic builds on Carl Dong's contributions to the Bitcoin Core kernel library, aiming to decouple the validation and non-validation logic needed to determine if a specific block extends the current best-work chain.