by Charlie Spears

Bitcoin Core has a new maintainer. If you aren’t immersed in dev circles like most of us, or don’t know what that means, this article is for you.

On January 8th, Bitcoin developer sedited — also known as TheCharlatan — became Bitcoin Core’s sixth maintainer, the first new addition since May 2023. He joins fellow maintainers Marco Falke, Ava Chow, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, and Hennadii Stepanov.

If that’s news to you, you probably need some memory jogging on what that even means. So I’m here to help explain GitHub to you.

Luckily, I caught up with sedited to discuss how he got here, what he’s focused on, and what comes next for the Bitcoin Core project.

And you may find it shocking, but what he’s working on gets at the heart of a lot of the drama surrounding Bitcoin Core over the past year. It may even set the stage for some of the main Bitcoin narrative arcs over the coming decade.

Editor’s note: it is common for Bitcoin Core contributors to prefer pseudonymity. “sedited” also goes by the alias “TheCharlatan.” While some of his info and history are accessible publicly, we won’t publish that here.

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