Bitcoin Core dev Gloria Zhao quits maintainer role after six-year stint

Bitcoin Core developer Gloria Zhao has stepped down arsenic a maintainer and revoked her Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) signing key, ending astir six years arsenic 1 of the project’s gatekeepers. 

On Thursday, Zhao submitted her past pull request to the Bitcoin GitHub repository, removing her cardinal from the trusted keys and withdrawing herself arsenic 1 of the fewer maintainers capable to update Bitcoin’s software.

Becoming the first known pistillate maintainer successful 2022, she focused connected mempool argumentation and transaction relay: the rules and peer‑to‑peer logic that determine which transactions get into nodes’ waiting rooms and however rapidly they propagate crossed the network. 

Gloria Zhao rather Bitcoin maintainer role. Source: GitHub

She helped plan and instrumentality bundle relay (BIP 331) and TRUC (Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation, BIP 431), on with upgrades to replace‑by‑fee (RBF) and broader P2P behavior, making interest bumping much reliable and reducing censorship.

Zhao’s enactment was funded done Brink, wherever she became the organization’s archetypal chap successful 2021, with her fellowship backed by the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund and Jack Dorsey’s Spiral (formerly Square Crypto), placing her among a tiny cohort of publically supported, full‑time open‑source Bitcoin protocol engineers.

Beyond her method contributions, Zhao mentored caller contributors and co‑ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club, helping inferior developers larn however to reappraisal analyzable changes and navigate Core’s blimpish reappraisal culture. 

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Split implicit OP_RETURN and Knots

Her resignation comes aft much than a twelvemonth of nationalist disputes betwixt Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, and the removal of OP_RETURN limits, a combat implicit whether Bitcoin’s default node bundle should marque it harder to usage artifact abstraction for non‑monetary data.

In 2025, Zhao deleted her X relationship amid idiosyncratic attacks during the OP_RETURN war, aft a livestream successful which a halfway developer questioned her credentials.

While immoderate Bitcoin Core critics celebrated Zhao’s departure, others took a much somber tone.

“They bullied her and made her beingness arsenic miserable arsenic imaginable until she rage quit, and rather frankly, I deliberation what they did to her was tragic,” said pseudonymous Bitcoiner Pledditor.

Pledditor added that it acceptable a “terrible precedent” and called it, “sad and pathetic.

“Congratulations you yet did it. You bullied 1 of Bitcoin Core's astir prolific and consistently fantabulous maintainers until she gave up,” said Chris Seedor, co-founder and CEO astatine Bitcoin wallet backup institution Seedor.

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