Bitcoin Core developer Gloria Zhao has resigned her maintainer role and revoked her PGP signing key, ending roughly six years as one of the project’s gatekeepers. On Thursday she submitted a final pull request to the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository that removed her key from the set of trusted maintainers and withdrew her ability to sign official releases.
Zhao, who became the first widely recognized female maintainer in 2022, was a prominent contributor on mempool policy and transaction relay — the peer-to-peer rules that determine which transactions enter nodes’ waiting areas and how quickly they propagate across the network. Her technical work includes designing and implementing package relay (BIP 331) and TRUC (Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation, BIP 431), as well as improvements to replace-by-fee (RBF) and other P2P behaviors intended to make fee bumping more reliable and to reduce censorship risk.
Her development work was funded through Brink, where she became the organization’s first fellow in 2021. That fellowship was supported by the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund and Jack Dorsey’s Spiral (formerly Square Crypto), placing Zhao among a small group of publicly supported, full-time open-source Bitcoin protocol engineers.
Beyond code, Zhao mentored newcomers and co-ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club, helping junior contributors learn to review complex changes and navigate Core’s conservative review culture.
Her departure follows more than a year of public disputes between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, centered on the removal of OP_RETURN limits — a contentious debate over whether default node software should make it harder to place non-monetary data in block space. In 2025, Zhao deleted her X account after facing personal attacks during that conflict and after a livestream in which a core developer questioned her credentials.
Reactions to her resignation were mixed. Some critics of Bitcoin Core celebrated the move. Others expressed regret and accused members of the community of driving her out; a pseudonymous Bitcoiner said she was bullied until she quit, calling the episode tragic and a terrible precedent, and an industry executive similarly criticized the treatment Zhao received.
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