Bitcoin developer Marco Falke announced that he has stepped down as a maintainer for Bitcoin Core on Tuesday.
There now remain just four maintainers of the protocol: Michael Ford, Hennadii Stepanov, Andrew Chow, and Gloria Zhao.
Falke was Bitcoin Core’s single largest contributor, having proposed over 2000 individual changes to Bitcoin’s codebase – aka “commits” – in his lifetime.
During three of his seven years as maintainer, Falke was supported and sponsored by the crypto exchange OKCoin and Web3 investment firm Paradigm.
“I remain passionate about open source and Bitcoin and I am positive about the future, however being a maintainer is no longer a good fit for me personally,” wrote Falke over Twitter. “I am happy about my achievements and recognize that they would not have been possible without my sponsors.”
As a maintainer, Falke’s job was to quality assurance test and approve new changes to Bitcoin’s code on GitHub.
Over the past two years, other Bitcoin development giants have moved away from their roles as maintainers, including John Newbery, Samuel Dobson, Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wuille and Wladimir J. van der Laan – the latter being Bitcoin Core’s former lead maintainer.
In Schneilli’s case, a combination of shifting interests and increasing legal risk for core devs motivated his departure in 2021. Indeed, Bitcoin developers are still under legal pressure from the likes of Craig Wright, who claims to be Bitcoin’s mysterious creator.
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