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 Michael Ford, 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.

We asked sedited if he'd been trying to become a maintainer (it's not exactly a job you apply for). 

“It has not been a goal of mine since contributing to Bitcoin. I guess the work I've been doing puts me in a position that made me a candidate, just because it was touching some places of the code,” he told Blockspace.

That code is called “libbitcoinkernel” – a project to extract Bitcoin Core's consensus rules into a standalone library.

“Consensus rules are the logic that determines whether a transaction or block is valid,” he continued. “They're what makes Bitcoin, Bitcoin.”

Surprisingly, due to the complexity of the code it’s actually quite difficult to define what lines of code are critical for Bitcoin consensus and which lines of code are just functions of the client. It’s been a longtime project to separate the consensus-only code from the rest of Core.

“The kernel project isolates this code so other software can use it directly rather than reimplementing it from scratch,” sedited said. 

"We can now actually, for the first time, clearly define what belongs to the consensus code and what doesn't. We have a clear boundary of what actually belongs to it and what is kind of adjacent to it. That's nice from a philosophical standpoint—these are the rules, and as long as you follow them, you should be fine."

Correction January 16, 2026 at 10:30am ET: Marco Falke was originally listed as one of the current Bitcoin Core maintainers, however he resigned in 2023. Michael Ford is one of the current six maintainers.

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